Conscience rights defeated p. 2
Record number of Life Chains p. 6
Canada’s Life and Family Newspaper
Wild Problems Review p. 15
November 2022, XL No. 8
the dark the dark side of side of transgenderism transgenderism p. 10-11
w w w. t he i nt e r i m. c o m
PAGE 2 — THE INTERIM, NOVEMBER 2022
40 Days for Life expands, saves lives
Interim Staff Billed as “The world’s largest grassroots movement to end abortion,” 40 Days for Life launched in a record 622 cities around the world, including 20 in Canada, for 40 days of continuous prayer outside abortuaries with the goal of ending abortion. The 40 Days for Life website states “It is a peaceful and educational presence. Those who are called to stand witness during this 24-hour-a-day presence send a powerful message to the community Fabout the tragic reality of abortion. It also serves as a call to repentance for those who work at the abortion centres and those who patronize the facilities.” It does this through prayer, fasting, and community outreach, with pro-lifers holding signs and praying outside abortuaries 24 hours around the clock. The campaign is non-denominational. The first 40 Days for Life was held in College Station, Texas, in 2004, launched nationally in 2007 and brought to Canada by Campaign Life Coalition in 2008. In 2010, there were 160 40 Days for Life locations held globally and four in Canada. It
continues to grow -- and save lives. According to an official count kept by 40 Days for Life, since 2007, there have been 22,289 babies saved, 131 abortion facilities closed, and 242 abortion workers who quit their jobs. It is unknown how many possible thousands of
are especially numerous in Europe, North America, and South America. There are five in Africa, one in South Korea, and one in Australia. This fall’s 40 Days for Life ministry is the first postRoe campaign. President and CEO Shawn Carney told
40 Days for Life witness in front of McMaster University Medical Centre in Hamilton, Ont.
women turned around without notifying 40 Days organizers. There are two 40 Days for Life campaigns each year, one in the fall and one in the spring. As of Oct. 20, 155 babies were confirmed as saved during the current 40 Days for Life witness. The current campaign is taking place on every continent except Antarctica, but
LifeSiteNews: “We have added new cities and grown even more at the grassroots at a time when abortion is leaving Washington, D.C. and going to where the pro-life movement is the strongest, the local level.” Meanwhile, Tomislav Cunovic, director of international affairs for 40 Days for
Life, told the Catholic News Agency, the twice-yearly campaigns “unites (pro-lifers) who are also in different parts of the world in the struggle for life.” 40 Days for Life in Spain was holding their first campaigns since the passing of a new law in April that bans prolife speech near abortion facilities, with those found guilty of breaking the law facing a possible prison sentence of 3-12 months. Spanish pro-life and religious leaders vowed that they would not be deterred, with the official 40 Days for Life Spain twitter account proclaiming, “the more they persecute us, the more we will embrace the Cross!” A notable early success in early October was the closing of a Mexico City abortuary named “Our Lady of Guadalupe Maternity.” There are a total of 20 locations in Canada for the fall campaign: St. John’s, Halifax, Sherbrooke, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, Victoria, and 13 locations in Ontario (Windsor, Sarnia, London, Kitchener, Welland, Niagara Falls, Hamilton, Oakville, Mississauga, Toronto, Peterborough, Ottawa, North Bay).
Pro-life MPs remain silent as left-wing MPs celebrate ‘Safe Abortion Day’ Prime Minister, cabinet celebrate abortion, insist there should be more Paul Tuns Sept. 28 was International “Safe Abortion Day,” and numerous Canadians acknowledged it on Twitter and in the House of Commons. Prime Minister Justin Tr udeau tweeted: "Canadians have had access to safe and legal abortions for almost 35 years. To those who continue to fight for their safety and bodily autonomy: We’ll always stand up to those who want to take us backwards, and we’ll always defend your right to choose." Campaign Life Coalition Youth responded to the Prime Minister's tweet: "There is nothing 'safe' about violently dismembering a human being in the womb. Not to mention, abortion jeopardizes women’s health. Canadian pro-lifers will not back down until we secure full legal protection for the unborn. 4 million unborn Canadians have been killed since 1969." Pro-life activist Laura Klassen, founder of Choice4Two, responded to Trudeau's tweet: "Not so safe for the one being murdered. Trudeau should watch an abortion video so he knows what it is that he’s supporting. Either he is incredibly evil, or incredibly uninformed. As a woman, I’m disgusted that my country promotes such a barbaric practice." The Prime Minister’s Office also released a statement: “Today, on International Safe Abortion Day, we reaffirm our unwavering commitment to upholding a woman’s fundamental right to choose. No one should ever be forced to carry an unwanted pregnan-
cy, and the Government of Canada is unequivocal in that pursuit.” The statement said Canadians “have had access to safe and legal abortions for almost 35 years thanks to decades of hard-fought activism” and that “Abortion is covered under our universal health care system.” The statement committed the government to expand abortion services, continue funding pro-abortion organizations such as Action Canada for Sexual Health and Rights and the National Abortion Federation Canada, and promote abortion in the developing world. The PMO statement concluded: “To those at home and around the world continuing to fight for their safety and their bodily autonomy: know that we will always stand up for your right to choose.” Justice Minister and Attorney General David Lametti tweeted: "Abortion in Canada is legal and will always be protected by Section 7 of the Charter. Sept 28th is International Safe Abortion Day. Because still to this day, many continue to fight for safe, legal abortions. We stand with them, in the fight for the right to choose." Minister of Families, Children and Social Development Karina Gould tweeted: “On #InternationalSafeAbortion Day, we continue the fight for access to safe and legal abortions. I will always stand up for your right to choose because access to safe abortions saves lives. #HerVoiceHerChoice." Minister of International Development Harjit Sajjin tweeted: “On #InternationalSafeAbortion Day, we stand firm on our
stance that every woman and every girl must have the autonomy to decide on abortion and matters related to their body–everyone must have the right to decide about their own future." Liberal MP Hedy Fry (Vancouver Centre) spoke in the House of Commons about promoting abortion abroad, stating “Canada must continue the life-saving work of increasing access to abortion in our own country and championing the issue globally.” NDP MP Don Davies ( Va n c o u v e r - K i n g s w a y ) replied to Liberals burnishing their abortion credentials, tweeting: "A right without access is illusory. It’s time to enforce the Canada Health Act and withhold transfers until every province and territory is in compliance." NDP MP Leah Gazan (Winnipeg Centre) tweeted: "Today is International Safe Abortion Day. We honour trailblazers who fought for the right to access safe and legal abortions and reproductive health care services. That fight continues. Reproductive health care access is still inequitable across Canada. #SafeAbortionRegardless." She also rose in the House of Commons to castigate the government for not yet ending the charitable tax status of pro-life groups, specifically pregnancy care centres that Gazan claimed “spread misinformation on abortion care.” NDP MP Nikki Ashton (Churchill-Keewatinook) tweeted: "September 28 is International Safe Abortion Day. Abortion is essential, normal, and common healthcare. Let’s bust the stigma and demand safe & legal abortion
access worldwide! #28Sept #InternationalSafeAbortion Day, Green Party MP and leadership contender Elizabeth May (Saanich-Gulf Islands) tweeted, "#Sept28 is International Safe Abortion Day. It is essential that Canada commit to ensuring equitable access to legal, safe abortions for all Canadians. Access needs to be expanded in rural Canada. We cannot take access to abortion for granted. http://september28.org @WGNRR." Many Liberal and NDP MPs also retweeted the online message of Action Canada for Sexual Health and Rights (Planned Parenthood Canada), which stated: "September 28 is International Safe Abortion Day. Abortion is essential, normal, and common healthcare. Let’s bust the stigma and demand safe & legal abortion access worldwide! #28Sept #InternationalSafeAbortion Day.” Action Canada followed up that tweet with "three actions you can take on#InternationalSafeAbortio nDay!" including donating to their Norma Scarborough Emergency Fund to help women overcome financial barrier to abortion in Canada, signing the organization's petition to the United Nations Human Rights Council to make abortion a human right, and read and distribute their brief on why Canada does not need an abortion law. Jeff Gunnarson, national president of Campaign Life Coalition, told The Interim “the silence of pro-life MPs online was deafening,” noting that while “many leftwing MPs promoted abortion, there was no pro-life MP countering their lies and propaganda.”
Legal challenge on N.B. abortion funding moves forward Mary Zwicker The New Brunswick government has long come under fire for its refusal to fund private abortion mills, including Clinic 554 in Fredericton, but in 2020, the controversy moved from the political arena to the legal system as it was drawn into a lawsuit over the issue, which is still ongoing. While provinces across Canada are required by the Canada Health Act to provide funding for services that are “medically necessary,” the Act does not define what is medically necessary. In 2015, the Liberal government of the day passed Regulation 84-20 that states, “abortions are deemed not to be entitled services unless they are performed in a hospital facility approved by the jurisdiction in which the hospital facility is located.” New Brunswick currently has three hospitals that carry out abortions, and the Blaine Higgs government continues to stand by its refusal to fund private abortuaries under policies that have been in place since Liberal Frank McKenna and Progressive Conservative Bernard Lord were the province’s premiers in the 1990s. The Higgs government says that abortions are readily available within the public system and opposes expanding publicly funded abortions to private facilities. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) announced in October 2020 that they would be taking the New Brunswick government to court if they did not repeal their laws which limited abortion in the province. CCLA officially did so in January 2021, and in July 2022, they won the motion to continue the case. Meanwhile, Justin Trudeau also took measures into his own hands, announcing in its 2020 and 2021 federal budgets that the federal government would be withholding the amount in health funds to the province that women had to pay out of pocket for their own abortions, about $140,000 in lost Canada Health Transfer. “Making sure that every woman across this country has access to reliable reproductive services is extremely important to us, and that’s why we’ve continued to impress strongly upon the government of New Brunswick how it needs to keep up its obligations under the Canada Health Act,” Trudeau said at the time. David Cooke, campaigns manager for Campaign Life Coalition and a resident of New Brunswick, told The Interim that this is a “critical issue” that the pro-life movement needs to “rally behind.” He said, “The New Brunswick govern-
ment rightly understands abortion to be an elective and voluntary procedure, which should not be treated as essential ‘healthcare,’ and which should not require the extraordinary funding of private abortuaries.” “The fact is that pregnancy is not a disease and abortion is not a ‘cure’!” Cooke explained. “It always results in death and misery, not health and healing. If the province can hold out and win on this issue, it will mean more babies saved and fewer women making the mistake of their lives.” In June, Clinic 554, a private abortuary, announced on Facebook that they had sold their building in Fredericton after failure to receive funding from the provincial government. However, they said that they are “relieved” that the new owners are allowing them to stay on and continue committing abortions temporarily until the building can be converted into affordable housing. “We are relieved that we can continue to provide care for the most vulnerable patients but recognize this is a stopgap solution. For now, patients in need of abortions will continue having access, but the provincial government needs to remove their abortion restrictions to ensure we can continue to provide care in the future. The Medical Service Payment Act restricts coverage to hospitals which results in people with uteruses facing unattainable travel distances, long wait times, problems accessing an abortion when they reach 13 weeks, and having to pay for an abortion. “ Ruth Robert, coordinator for CLC in Atlantic Canada, told The Interim that the legal challenge is important because it involves the lives of innocent children which hang in the balance. “This issue is critical,” she said, “because obviously, we don’t want people to be getting abortions! And if the govt is going to get involved in this matter, they are prioritizing individual moral codes over the law and over provincial jurisdictions.” Robert said, “Ultimately, if the provincial govt buckles under this kind of pressure, we are going to have more babies dying because the clinic will open to its former capacity or a new clinic will open.” In 2002, abortionist Henr y Morgentaler launched a lawsuit challenging the province’s refusal to pay for abortions at his Fredericton abortion mill. The case was dropped when the abortionist died in 2013. In 2014, the Morgentaler abortion mill closed its doors, but the next year, Dr. Adrian Edgar, a family physician who specializes in abortion, contraception, and transgender health services, opened Clinic 554 at the same location.
THE INTERIM, NOVEMBER 2022— PAGE 3
Quebec physicians call for infant euthanasia Paul Tuns During Oct. 7 testimony at the Commons’ Special Joint Committee of Medical Assistance in Dying, Dr. Louis Roy, speaking on behalf of the Quebec College of Physicians, called for euthanasia for infants up to age one who are born with "severe malformations" and "grave and severe syndromes" when physicians believe there is little chance for survival, setting off a firestorm of opposition to young child euthanasia. Parliament is reviewing Canada's euthanasia and doctor-assisted suicide law in a special joint committee of the House of Commons and Senate. Euthanasia advocates are calling for a liberalizing of the Medical Assistance in Dying law to permit socalled mature minors -- adolescents deemed competent to make their own medical decisions -- to access medicalized killing, as well as permitting advance requests for euthanasia and euthanasia for people suffering solely from mental illness. The committee is also supposed to examine the state of palliative care in Canada and how to protect Canadians with disabilities. Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, told The Interim, he is concerned that the committee will focus not on the abuses of euthanasia and protecting people who might not want to be medically killed and instead stress ways in which euthanasia would be expanded. Roy's testimony opened the door further to an eventual broadening of permissibility for infants. Speaking in favour of teenagers being permitted to "access" euthanasia, he added, "the same for babies from zero to one years of age who are born with severe deformations" and "whose life expectancy and suffering are such as that it makes sense that they do not suffer." Roy, an inspector with the Quebec College of Physicians' Professional Inspection Department, is described by the College as a family physician with "an interest in geriatrics, people with loss of autonomy, critical care, and palliative care." He has trained medical students at the Faculty of Medicine of Université Laval since 2008, served as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Quebec Palliative Care Network from 2001 to 2006, and Chairman of the Committee on the Development of Palliative Care for the Directorate for the Fight Against Cancer. Krista Carr with Inclusion Canada responded to Roy's argument, telling the National Post, "Canada cannot begin killing babies when doctors predict there is no hope for them," in part because "predictions are far too often based on discriminatory assumptions about life with a disability." She also said, "An infant cannot consent to their own death. This isn’t MAiD, it’s murder. And providing MAiD to a person who cannot consent is a standard that is wildly dangerous for all persons
with intellectual disabilities in Canada." Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, told the Post: "Why would you then have to give the child a lethal dose? If the child is not going to survive, the child can be kept comfortable and die naturally. There’s no reason for us to kill the child. There’s no reason for us to do this at all." The Quebec College of Physicians issued a press release in 2021 calling for euthanasia for infants who are subject to "extreme suffering that cannot be
soothed, coupled with very dark prognostics," and arguing that it could be safely regulated by a "strict protocol." Schadenberg told The Interim that so-called safeguards are routinely ignored and often eventually scrapped. Canadian Physicians for Life issued an Open Letter to the committee signed by 192 medical professionals, noting "We strongly object to Dr. Louis Roy’s suggestion that Canada should expand the euthanasia/ MAiD criteria to include infants from newborns to 1-year-olds," because
"Medicine needs to be humble enough to admit that it doesn’t have all the answers when a life-limiting prognosis is given to an individual." The signatories noted, "We do not and cannot foresee exactly what a child’s quality of life will be in a few years and it is misplaced compassion to suggest that ending the child’s life constitutes care." The Canadian Physicians for Life letter noted, "In our experience there is no way for parents to reasonably adjudicate whether ending their child’s life is legitimate" and that "even the idea of this places immense
Lewis, Block, Moore among Poilievre’s ‘shadow cabinet’ Paul Tuns After Leslyn Lewis finished third in the party's leadership, pro-life Canadians were eager to see whether she would make newly minted Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre's leadership team or list of critics. Poilievre named his leadership team in early September, days after winning the leadership on the first ballot, with two openly homosexual MPs being named to important positions: Melissa Lantsman (Thornhill) as one of two deputy leaders and Eric Duncan (Stormont-DundasSouth Glengarry) as question period coordinator. Among the nine named to the leadership team, only Andrew Scheer -- the new Conservative Party House Leader -- has a pro-life voting record Leader despite the fact as leader he said he would not re-open the issue;; deputy leader Tim Uppal (Edmonton Mill Woods) has a mixed record on life and family issues. Nearly a full month later, on Oct. 12, Poilievre named his 51-member "shadow cabinet" of critics and 20 associate critics to hold the Trudeau government to account. Leslyn Lewis was one of about a dozen prolife MPs to make the shadow cabinet, although most of them were not given positions in which their social conservatism would necessarily come into play. Lewis was named the party's critic for infrastructure and communities where she will go up against Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, Infrastructure and Communities Dominic LeBlanc. Other high-profile prolife MPs given positions were Kelly Block (Carlton Trail-Eagle Creek) who was named critic for public services and procurement and Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park-Fort Saskatchewan) who is the new critic for international development. Campaign Life Coalition national president Jeff Gunnarson told The Interim that considering Canada's billion-dollar commitment to fund abortion advocacy abroad, "Genuis will have plenty of opportunity to fly the pro-life flag in his critic's job." Rob Moore (Fundy Royal) was named the new
pressure and unjust guilt on parents for the suffering of their children and families." The medical professionals affirm "that much physical suffering can be dramatically alleviated through proper palliative care" and that "expanding euthanasia to infants violates the principle of autonomy which was supposed to be essential to this law in Canada." They conclude "we will not abandon children and their families who suffer." National Post columnist Ben Woodfinden wrote about Roy's testimony in an opinion piece in which he observed, "Assisted death
Conscience rights’ bill defeated in House of Commons vote Paul Tuns
Leslyn Lewis was named critic for infrastructure and communities and Rob Moore was named justice critic.
justice critic. Gunnarson said that Moore can use his position to defend life and family as he tussles with Justice Minister and Attorney General David Lametti, most notably on the euthanasia file. "MP Rob Moore must take the lead in opposing any further liberalization of Canada's euthanasia laws by the Trudeau government," said Gunnarson. Among the MPs who have a green rating by Campaign Life Coalition that were named to the shadow cabinet are ethics and accountable government critic Michael Barrett (Leeds-Grenville); national defense critic James Bezan (Selkirk-Interlake-Eastman); democratic reform critic Michael Cooper (St. AlbertEdmonton); mental health and suicide prevention critic Todd Doherty (Cariboo Prince-George); immigration, refugees and citizenship critic Tom Kmiec (Calgary Shepard); emergency preparedness critic Dane Lloyd (Sturgeon River—Parkland); digital government critic Ben Lobb (Huron-Bruce); federal economic development agency for eastern, central and southern Ontario critic Lianne Rood (Lambton-Kent-Middlesex); transport critic Mark Strahl (Chilliwack-Hope); natural resources critic Shannon Stubbs (Lakeland); Canadian heritage critic Rachael Thomas (Lethbridge); and northern affairs and Arctic sovereignty critic Bob Zimmer (Prince George— Peace River). Several MPs that have received CLC's yellow light -- a caution based on a mixed record or inadequate information – hold critics positions important for social issues. Stephen Ellis (Cumberland— Colchester) is the new health critic; Michelle Ferreri (Peterborough–Kawartha) is the critic for families, chil-
dren and social development; and Tracy Gray is the critic for employment, future workforce development and disability inclusion. Michael Chong, one of the few Conservative MPs with a red-light rating from CLC for his promotion of abortion and LGBTQ rights, is the new foreign affairs critic. Another red-light Conservative MP, Karen Vecchio, is the party's new critic for women and gender equality and youth. Vecchio calls herself "pro-choice," voted against her colleague Cathay Wagantall's private member's bill banning sexselective abortion, voted for the Trudeau government's euthanasia bills and supported its transgender ideology bill that banned so-called conversion therapy. Gunnarson said that CLC is especially concerned that Chong and Vecchio were named to posts that are of special interest to pro-life and pro-family Canadians and worries that "with these two MPs in those critics positions, the Conservatives might not oppose the most radical policies of this Trudeau government that has shown a willingness to use every lever of power to advance their left-wing social agenda." Gunnarson noted that while most of the green-lit MPs named as critics do not hold positions where they could press the government on social issues, they can still use their profile to raise these issues in caucus. "We have a good number of allies around the table and we hope that they use their position to give voice to those vulnerable to the culture of death." Gunnarson also called upon the pro-life critics (and all pro-life MPs) “to express their pro-life views publicly at all times” to “help counter the current media narrative See ‘O’Toole’ p. 15
or suicide isn’t even the right word for what’s being described here," because, "A baby cannot consent, a baby cannot decide they want to end their own life, it’s not about any kind of 'choice' or 'autonomy'." Woodfinden said infant euthanasia is "straight up infanticide." Woodfinden concluded his column saying: "The decision here will say something important about the fundamental nature of this country, and who we are. We must not become a country that sanctions the killing of infants under the guise of compassion."
On Oct. 5, Kelly Block's private member's bill, Bill C-230, The Protection of Freedom of Conscience Act, was defeated in a 203-115 vote. Every Conservative MP present for the vote, including leader Pierre Poilievre, voted for the bill, along with independent MP Kevin Vuong (Spadina-Fort York). All present Liberal, NDP, Bloc, and Green MPs voted against the bill. During debate on Sept. 29, Block explained the importance of C-230: "Protecting individuals from coercion ... is not foreign to the Criminal Code of Canada, as found in section 425. If Parliament can enshrine criminal penalties for employers for coercing employees not to form a union, then surely we can provide similar protection for medical professionals when dealing with conscience protections." She concluded, "With Bill C-230, I have put forward comprehensive yet simple legislation that is important to medical professionals from coast to coast. I would welcome a committee's examination of it, as well as any recommendations to improve it." If passed in second reading, the bill, which sought to make it a crime to intimidate, fire, or refuse to hire medical professionals due to their conscientious refusal to participate in euthanasia and assisted suicide, would have been studied in committee. During the debate on Sept. 29, Mark Gerretsen, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons, claimed to support conscience rights, insisted that current law took conscience rights into account, and explained he could not support C-230 by insisting "it is not evident that an additional specific offence is required to protect conscience rights." The Liberal government has long argued that nothing in the euthanasia legislation requires health care workers to violate their conscience, ignoring that absent Criminal Code protections, the reality is that the medical professional bodies for physicians, nurses, and pharmacists in all provinces require medical profession-
als that cannot participate directly in immoral practices such as abortion or euthanasia to provide an "effective referral" to a doctor who will carry out those procedures. In a letter in support of C-230 issued by the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada in March, the EFC explained why conscience protection is insufficient in much of Canada: "For some doctors and nurse practitioners, having to make an effective referral is akin to performing the procedure itself. Whether they end a patient’s life themselves or arrange for it to be done by someone else (via effective
MP Kelly Block vows to continue the fight to protect conscience rights despite C-230 being defeated in the House of Commons last month.
referral), they are still participating in the process." Only Manitoba has conscience protection that does not force medical professionals to violate their conscience by directing them to refer patients to doctors that will carry about abortion and euthanasia deaths – which trumps the medical bodies’ diktats. Campaign Life Coalition and the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition refer to the Manitoba law as the "gold standard in conscience protection" and have called for other provinces to pass similar protections. On the day of the vote, two MPs, Arnold Viersen (Peace River-Westlock) and Len Webber (Calgary Confederation), introduced petitions calling upon Parliament to pass a bill protecting conscience rights. Webber, who stood up in the House a week earlier to speak in favour of conscience rights, reiterating his point: "As I said in my speech on this matter last week, I truly believe that as a society we must find a way to give Canadians something See ‘Block’ p. 13
PAGE 4 — THE INTERIM, NOVEMBER 2022
Where are the pro-life MPs?
On so-called “Safe Abortion Day” in September, most pro-abortion MPs acknowledged the day. In May and June when the Dobbs decision was leaked and officially released, overturning the infamous Roe decision, many federal and provincial pro-abortion politicians criticized the decision while you could count on one hand the number of pro-life MPs who applauded it. When Queen’s Park resumed in the summer after the Ontario election, many MPPs in their inaugural comments before the legislature talked about how LGBTQ or other moral issues personally impacted them. Politicians on the Left are very good at talking about their issues – and finding ways to talk about them. They do so regularly, and in doing so normalize practices such as abortion, euthanasia, same-sex “marriage” and transgender ideology. This is about more than telling stories that personalize moral issues – although doubtless there is an element of this to it. Rather it shows a commitment to pushing the envelope on so-called controversial moral issues so that eventually it does not seem like envelope pushing. This commitment to repeatedly raise moral issues on the Left is not matched by a similar commitment among those MPs who say they are pro-life and pro-family. While many pro-life MPs do submit prolife petitions and talk about these issues in Parliament when they are raised, typically by private member’s bills or in opposition to efforts by the Liberal government to broaden various social licenses, few find the nerve to talk about their pro-life and pro-family views in order to normalize doing so. When pro-life MPs internalize the idea that they should not broach the topics of abortion or euthanasia except when there is a formal debate on such matters in the form of a bill or motion, they are making it more difficult
for other pro-life MPs, including future pro-life MPs, to raise these topics. When pro-life MPs raise these topics so subtly that the mainstream media ignores their interventions, they are not really normalizing talking about abortion or euthanasia in the public square; indeed, they signal that only through coded language can these topics be raised by elected officials lest they face the ire of the Parliamentary Press Gallery and the editorial writers of daily newspapers. When Patrick Brown was the Ontario Progressive Conservative leader, Ontario MPP Sam Oosterhoff noted the barbaric practice of eugenic abortions on World Down Syndrome Day and was punished by his party leader. Many federal and provincial elected officials want to avoid a similar fate, but their silence helps no one: not themselves, their pro-life colleagues, the pro-life movement, nor the victims of abortion and euthanasia. Silence becomes habit-forming and if pro-life MPs are not careful, there will be little evidence on the floor of the House of Commons that they are, in fact, pro-life. We admit that pro-life MPs can do a lot of good behind the scenes, including raising pro-life issues in caucus and cabinet meetings, outside the view of the public. But the silence of pro-life MPs in the face of relentless pro-abortion, pro-euthanasia, and pro-LGBTQ talk from the Left means that the discussion on moral issues is one-sided. It is difficult to imagine pro-life legislative victories in an environment in which pro-lifers are afraid to discuss the topic. As Josie Luetke writes in her column this month, the desire to not look extreme is no longer an option for those who oppose prenatal homicide – or the medicalized killing of patients under the guise of Medical Assistance in Dying. This is especially true for those who have the platform provided by elected office.
From abortion to infant euthanasia Last month, Dr. Louis Roy of the Quebec College of Physicians testifying at the Commons’ Special Joint Committee of Medical Assistance in Dying called for euthanasia for infants up to the age of one who are born with “severe malformations” and “grave and severe syndromes” when a physician reckons there is little chance for survival or whose suffering is deemed too much. The grisly call for a change to public policy to permit the medicalized murder of newborns is the logical next step for a polity that permits eugenic abortions – the targeted killing of preborn children with prenatal diagnoses detected by genetic tests. It also represents Canadian public policy taking a step closer to the dark ideology of bioethicist Peter Singer. For more than four decades, Singer argued for a right to abortion after birth in cases of severely disabled infants. The right to abortion after birth is more accurately labeled infanticide, which is what euthanasia for infants would clearly qualify as. It would be illustrative to quote directly from Singer’s body of work. In his handbook Practical Ethics (1979), he argued: "Human babies are not born self-aware, or capable of grasping that they exist over time. They are not persons … the life of a newborn is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee." He said parents and physicians should have the right to decide if "the infant's life will be so miserable or so devoid of minimal satisfaction that it would be inhumane or futile to prolong life." In Should the Baby Live: The Problem of Handicapped Infants (co-written with Helga Kuhse in 1985), Singer argued: "It does not seem wise to add to the burden on
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limited resources by increasing the number of severely disabled children." Thus, Singer and Kuhse suggested, "a period of 28 days after birth might be allowed before an infant is accepted as having the same right to live as others." He would, in later writings and speeches, say that the right to abortion could be extended to two years old, at which time he determined the infant was self-aware. Singer’s ugly worldview is based on Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian idea that mankind should maximize happiness and pleasure and minimize unhappiness and pain. With infanticide – whether gussied up as a post-birth abortion or infant euthanasia – a third party (whether it be the parents or a doctor) would be making the decision about which life is worth living in order to minimize pain, with the child having no say whatsoever. Singer is an internationally renowned author, a former president of the International Association of Bioethics, a tenured professor at Princeton University, and an endowed chair at the university’s Center for Human Values. He is not some marginal academic, but a major influence on two generations of bioethicists, the doctors they have instructed and medical bodies they have infiltrated. Singer’s warped worldview may shock many Canadians who blanch at the idea of euthanizing infants, but we wonder how long widespread opposition to killing newborns will last, considering the public’s tolerance of eugenic abortions. If it makes sense to kill a child in utero because of its health status, what, exactly, is the principle that prevents killing a child a few months later for the same reason?
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Preamble to a philosophy class Donald DeMarco Commentary I came across a headline recently which stated the following: “LGBT doctor praises ‘transgendered’ boy who ‘boldly’ killed himself.” Are we passed being shocked? Here is a statement, that to me, signals the end of civilization, if not the end of the world. A doctor, trained to cure, praises suicide. A girl believes she is a boy, yet cannot live that way. Sexual aberrations are given professional status. The world is upside down, but not complaining! Another item informs us that an employee of a daycare centre was fired for not reading LGBT propaganda to the toddlers. Is the centre committed to care or to corruption? And the beat goes on. The phenomenon of professionals doing the opposite of what they are supposed to do was duly noted by Ray Bradbury in his classic, Fahrenheit 451. The acclaimed science fiction writer was an innocent pedestrian when he was harassed by the police. He was outraged by the fact
that, in this case, the police were doing the very opposite of what was expected of them. The incident proved to be the inspiration of Bradley’s Fahrenheit 451 in which the fire department, instead of extinguishing fires, starts them, its target was books, literature that could improve people’s minds. The ideology of absolute equality outlawed anyone from being educated. Fahrenheit 451 has grown to be more relevant today than when it was first penned in 1953. At my age, I no longer have the daunting challenge of facing a classroom of students who have been formed by the mainstream media. Secular influence is quite powerful and I wonder how far I could get using reason as my only means of reaching them. Reason seems out of vogue, but, as a consequence, so does civilized culture. What would I say to them on the first day of a philosophy class? I would, if the situation presented itself, say the following, though what I am doing here, realistically, is passing the baton
to other teachers who dare to impart the wisdom of history’s great thinkers to neophytes who are possessed by the Zeitgeist: “We meet together this day having one outstanding asset in common. We are all rational beings. It is on this basis that we can share the fruits of reason. You are all taskmasters of reason. You took full advantage of this universal faculty in order to get here: getting dressed, finding your way from your place of residence to this classroom where what you practice on a minute-tominute basis will be honoured and refined, leading you to acquire knowledge that will illuminate your lives and open vistas that will benefit you greatly. “Although I am the teacher and you are the students, I want to emphasize throughout the course how much we have in common. The employment of reason should not arouse any antagonism. It is both my aim and my duty to enlighten and not to offend, to inspire and not to stimulate revolt. If reason proves ineffective, I have nothing to fall
back on. I stand before you as a pauper, having nothing other than reason as my apologia and my defence. “Reason is our ally in more ways than we can enumerate. We become free through reason, not from reason. It is our sole light as we journey through the labyrinth of life. It dispels darkness. “I presume that none of you holds insanity as an ideal. And if insanity is a crippling privation, all the more does that fact attest to the strength and reliability of reason. “Reason is unifying. It is the only sure road to the things we cherish, including peace and prosperity. Life presents us with many crossroads in which we must choose between what we prefer and what is more reasonable. I hope that this course will endear you to reason so that when faced with a dilemma you will choose the path laid out by reason. Let reason be your guide through life and not the competing ideologies that are truly the enemies of reason, for the enemies of reason are indeed enemies that will ruin your lives.”
Happy 8 billion!
From the editor’s desk In July, the United Nations’ Population Division predicted that on Nov. 15, global population would hit 8 billion people. Let us be among the first to wish the newborn baby boy or girl, probably born in Africa, the Middle East, or south Asia, a happy birth day and welcome to the human family. Typically, the UN’s population estimates come with unadulterated negativity over a population explosion, rooted in the 18th century predictions of Thomas Malthus and 1970s-era alarmism of Paul Ehrlich. This year, however, the concern was more muted with the Population Division’s report noting the challenges of both rapidly growing population in the poorer developing world and declining birthrates in the richer West and Far East. An uncharitable view of this juxtaposition would suggest that the authors are worried that there are more poor black Africans and fewer rich white Europeans. Whether or not this racism is conscious, the effects of worrying about global “overpopulation” are undoubtedly seen in the efforts to spread abortion and birth control to every corner of the planet as a form of ideological colonialism, ignoring local customs and mores when it comes to familial relations and sexual behaviour. The idea that there are too many people for the world to support is rooted in the Malthusian idea that population grows geometrically while food supplies only grow arithmetically. Malthus (1776-1834) can be forgiven for writing An Essay on the Principle of Population at the beginning of the industrial revolution when new harvest techniques increased crop yields and for living more than a full century before refrigerated transportation extended supply chains so that farmers could support workers in far-away cities. He also died the century before birthrates began to fall dramatically in Europe and North America after the post-World War II baby boom as women entered the formal workforce. While history has proven Malthus wrong, he still has his followers, most notably among them Paul Ehrlich (born in 1932). Erhlich, a Stanford entomologist, published one of the most influential books of the 20th century, The Population Bomb. That small, bestselling paperback’s first line was: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over” -- and humanity lost. He stated, “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death,” predicting, “nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.” Well,
something did. Not only has population steadily grown since Erhlich’s apocalyptic book appeared, the number of people living in extreme poverty declined steadily (at least until the Covid pandemic restrictions and the Russian war in Ukraine upended globalized trade). If Ehrlich was correct that humanity would not be able to feed itself and mass starvation would ensue, overpopulation would be its own solution as population levels settled at a sustainable level. That sounds barbaric so the Club of Rome and policymakers throughout the West -- most infamously the National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests (NSSM200), the so-called Kissinger Report -- advocated population control in the developing world. NSSM200, which remained classified until the 1980s, explicitly argued population control was necessary in order for the West to maintain resource hegemony. G.K. Chesterton remarked more than a century ago that people who hold the fashionable idea that there are too many people always think there are too many of some other people; the idle rich think there are too many working poor, the Englishmen think there are too many Africans. That is usually, but not always true; Red China adopted a brutal one-child policy to curb its own population growth and it was so effective the country’s communist government is now encouraging people to have multiple children to stem depopulation.
18th century predictions of Thomas Malthus and 1970s-era alarmism of Paul Ehrlich proven wrong Economist Julian Simon called humanity the “ultimate resource” and observed that rather than depopulation, the world needed more people to increase the chances of future innovators to discover or produce solutions to the problems humanity faced. More recently, business mogul Elon Musk said, “If people don’t have more children, civilization will crumble.” Simon and Musk are the positive flipside of overpopulation being its own solution, and as admirable as this viewpoint is, it still misses the point. Mother Teresa of Calcutta said, “How can there be too many children? That is like saying there are too many flowers.” Children are good in and of themselves because mankind is made in the image of God. That gives us dignity and sanctifies our lives. The idea that there can be too many of us is morally repugnant. As the saying goes, the more the merrier. By the way, when Paul Ehrlich predicted that mankind’s ability to feed itself was coming to an end, there were 3.6 billion people on Earth. Happy birth day to number 8 billion.
~
Paul Tuns
THE INTERIM, NOVEMBER 2022— PAGE 5
Prudential abortion legislation National Affairs Rory Leishman
I
n a nationwide poll conducted shortly after the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States on June 24 to overturn Roe v. Wade, the authoritative, non-partisan Pew Research Center found that 57 per cent of Americans disapproved of the ruling. In this same poll, 62 per cent said they believed abortion should be legal “in all or most circumstances.” In the face of such adverse public opinion, how should pro-life legislators try to save the lives of as many babies in the womb as possible? To begin with, it is evident that consistently pro-life legislators should make crystal clear that they stand by the truth, no matter how unpopular, that all human life is sacred from conception to natural death and that the deliberate killing of a baby in the womb is a crime that can never be justified. Granted, on this basis, pro-life politicians could not get elected to the legislature in most jurisdictions in New York State, Massachusetts or, for that matter, Canada, where most voters are so deluded by pro-abortion propaganda that they would not support any consistently pro-life candidate. But so be it. It would be shameful for any pro-life politician to dissemble or change their pro-life convictions in an attempt to gain public office.
Killing a preborn child is never justified Pro-life legislators in states where pro-lifers control the legislature face different challenges. In 2019, pro-life Republicans in Missouri set a good example by taking advantage of their predominance in the state legislature to enact a trigger law contingent upon the reversal of Roe v. Wade that places a complete ban on abortion with no exceptions for rape or incest. Then, as now, this law was very unpopular. In August, an opinion poll in Missouri found that 75 per cent supported abortion in the case of rape and 79 per cent in the case of incest. Regardless, within one hour after the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Dobbs overturning Roe v. Wade, Missouri’s pro-life Republican Governor Mike Parson signed the state’s Right to Life of the Unborn Child Act into law, making Missouri the first of 17 states to effectively ban all abortions in the aftermath of the Dobbs ruling. Will many, if not most, of Missouri’s pro-life legislators who steadfastly affirmed the sanctity of all human life in defiance of majority public opinion go down to defeat at the next legislative election? That is most unlikely. Even among pro-choice voters, many do not regard abortion as the most important election issue. Thus, in the August poll of Missouri voters, 50 per cent approved the overall performance of Governor Parson, despite his having signed into law the unpopular bill banning all abortions just two months earlier. In contrast, only 36 per cent of the respondents in this same poll approved the performance of pro-choice President Joe Biden. Opinion polls in Missouri and elsewhere confirm that while some pro-life legislators are likely to go down to defeat in upcoming elections, few will do so solely or even mainly because of their anti-abortion convictions. What about pro-life members of a state legislature where the majority of all members supports neither a total ban on abortion nor unrestricted abortion on demand? The Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) in Washington addressed this issue in a recent policy paper entitled “Protecting the Unborn: A Scholars’ Statement of Pro-Life Principle and Political Prudence.” This document was signed by 21 of the most eminent pro-life intellectuals in the United States including the Evangelical theologian Carl R. Trueman and Catholic philosopher Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University. Among several scenarios addressed in this paper, the scholars consider the case of a legislature where, due to political pressures, the only available choices are to “prohibit elective abortions after eight weeks or do nothing.” Considering that “passing the bill would have the positive effect of banning some elective abortions that would otherwise remain lawful,” the scholars conclude: “voting for the bill can be morally appropriate.” Pro-lifers can reasonably disagree about the prudence of such a judgment, but all should agree with the insistence of the EPPC scholars that any legislator who backs a prolife bill that stops short of banning all deliberate abortions should “make clear that they are supporting the bill, despite their objections to all elective abortions and their unsuccessful efforts to make the bill more just, in order to secure the best protections available now.”
PAGE 6 — THE INTERIM, NOVEMBER 2022
What are bad manners in a massacre?
Life Chain reaches almost 300 Canadian communities
Interim Staff
Talk Turkey Josie Luetke
I
magine someone intent on climbing Mount Everest asks a sherpa for the lowdown. The sherpa would be doing nobody any favours if he omits the dangers of this climb, or focuses only on the joys of summiting, because he wants to spare the climber’s feelings rather than voice his doubt about the climber’s abilities. He has a responsibility to convey the reality of Everest accurately. The alternative could be deadly. In the same way, we aren’t helping anybody by tiptoeing around the brutality of abortion. It’s a trend seemingly afflicting crisis pregnancy centres that wish to appear apolitical but come across as amoral. Some right-to-life groups even shy away from branding themselves “pro-life,” because of the negative connotations our culture has associated with the term. A pastor told me he doesn’t want to hold any “controversial” Life Chain signs. A fellow pro-life leader expressed sympathy with a different pastor and religious sister who don’t want any “Choice” Chains (or other pro-life demonstrations) on the public property in front of their church, because abortion victim photography is “aggressive.” As usual, I am disappointed by the weakness of the clergy. Is it too much to ask for a priest who’s willing to be controversial? Jesus was controversial. Holding a sign that says, “Abortion kills children” might be controversial, but precisely, the fact that abortion kills children is what’s controversial. Abortion violently destroys the bodies of tiny humans or else deprives them of oxygen and nourishment. Photography of abortion victims is “aggressive,” because abortion is aggressive. I’m irritated by “soft” pro-lifers who want to shield the public from the truth. I’m sure they view themselves as just being kind and considerate. They’re not. It’s non-compassionate not to present the fullest picture of a human rights’ injustice. “Compassion” means “to suffer with,” for indeed there is suffering. There is no charity without truth. Preferring to promote adoption than denigrate abortion, for instance, might seem safer – for you, not the preborn child. Post-abortive men and women suffer for decades, because they can’t reconcile their grief with the refrain that abortion is just the trivial removal of a clump of cells. You can’t heal a wound until you realize there is a wound, and the full extent of it. Exposition is not causation of the wound—and yes, while how and why we expose it matters, it must be exposed. In one parable (Matthew 25:14-30), a man distributes talents amongst his servants. Upon his return, he rewards those who traded them to make more, but berates the one who buried his talent out of fear, throwing him into the darkness, “where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.” It’s not a perfect fit here, because soft pro-lifers are still doing something with their talents and making some of the truth known. They’re just not doing enough. God doesn’t reward us for playing it “safe;” we punish ourselves. So, go all in. We can wring our hands all we want, and worry about being too harsh, or offending someone, but I’d much rather stand before God having made mistakes—been too rude, too rash, too unprofessional—in my sincere attempt to loudly denounce evil than to only quietly whisper my disagreement. Part of it pertains to something the left refers to as respectability politics; I’ll reframe it as the attempt to achieve change while still adhering to the social mores protecting the status quo. It’s impolite to accuse others of killing innocent human beings, or of being complicit in this slaughter through action or inaction, and so some pro-lifers don’t. They believe as long as they avoid directly calling out their peers, or placing blame, they can still be liked and win the world’s approval. Hardened, tested activists are not going to be respected in most people’s eyes. As abortionists rip off limbs, we are going to step on toes. Look around. Not only does Canada kill 100,000 preborn children through abortion and 10,000 adults through euthanasia per year, but our government is actively thwarting those of us opposing these evils. Bubble zones have been erected throughout much of the country, prolife organizations are unfairly excluded from the Canada Summer Jobs program, and crisis pregnancy centres are on the verge of losing their charitable status. You shouldn’t want to be liked by this world; that’s a sure sign you’re doing something wrong. Jesus told us over and over again that we will be hated. Are you? That doesn’t give us an excuse to be impudent, etc., but telling the truth as it is, calmly and frankly, is not impudent. It’s the most loving thing we can do.
On Oct. 2, the first Sunday of October, pro-lifers in almost 300 communities across Canada participated in Life Chain, which Campaign Life Coalition noted was “a substantial increase from the 270 Life Chain locations last year, and the approximately 250 Life Chain locations in years prior.” Josie Luetke, Campaign Life Coalition director of education and advocacy and a member of the Life Chain committee, told The Interim, “CLC is grateful to all our volunteers and local organizers who helped expand this witness to the sanctity of life to almost 300 locations from coastto-coast, an impressive rebound considering that just a couple of years ago, fewer than 250 communities
participated in Life Chain.” She noted that among the nearly two dozen new communities hosting Life Chain were Summerside, P.E.I, Miramichi, N.B., Aylmer, Ont., and Ladner, B.C. Communities that revived their Life Chain activities included Fredericton, N.B., Belleville, Ont., and Duncan, B.C. During Life Chain, prolifers witness for one hour at busy intersections in their community holding life-affirming signs such as “Abortion kills children,” “Life, the first inalienable right,” “Abortion hurts women,” “Pray for an end to abortion,” and “Jesus forgives and heals.” Many participants bring their families and pray silently during the hour. They are typically organized by local pro-life groups or church ministries. Campaign Life Coalition
national president Jeff Gunnarson told The Interim this was the first Life Chain since Roe v. Wade was overturned in the United States and he thought “the excitement about the possibility of life winning south of the border energized pro-lifers in Canada.” Gunnarson overall numbers are increasing with several locations that previously attracted a handful of regular pro-lifers seeing a revitalization this year. “The numbers are slowly increasing after attendance slid during Covid, and in some areas they are growing to sizes not seen in many years.” CLC said on their website, “the reach of the prolife message is extended with every new community that partakes in this witness to the sanctity of life.” Of note, after an absence in 2021, Life Chain returned
to New Brunswick, with five locations. The Prince Edward Island Life Chain was postponed until Oct. 22 due to Hurricane Fiona. CLC noted, “all ten provinces (and one territory!) are contributing to this coast-to-coast activism. In the United States, National Life Chain reported that there were Life Chain demonstrations in more than 600 cities, many with more than one location. Life Chain began in California in the 1980s and was brought to Canada by Campaign Life Coalition in the 1990s. Luetke said, “CLC looks forward to growing Life Chain further, and encourages anyone interested in bringing this event to their area to reach out now for guidance.” The next Life Chain will be on Sunday, Oct. 1, 2023.
Atlantic Canada pro-lifers deal with Hurricane Fiona Mary Zwicker On Sept. 24, Hurricane Fiona touched down in eastern Canada, wreaking havoc on the Atlantic provinces. While the hurricane destroyed homes, left some Canadians without power for weeks, and even forced the cancellation of some pro-life events, the prolife movement has taken this opportunity to comment on how such a terrible event can further lead people to recognize the inherent value of human life. Patricia Wiedemer, executive director of PEI LIFE, told The Interim that the hurricane forced PEI LIFE to cancel a large event, Evening4LIFE, which they had organized for Oct. 1, with Focus on the Family Canada Jean-Paul Beran and Focus on the Family’s B.C. regional director Steve Wilson as their keynote speakers. Wiedemer said that they were expecting more than 200 people for their event, but that a lack of power made it impossible to host. Additionally, Wiedemer said that “the worry and anxiety surrounding the clean up procedures were overwhelming” and that “people
needed to look after their families and homes.” PEI LIFE has rescheduled the event for the spring. However, while this cancellation was disappointing and Hurricane Fiona was extremely damaging to Atlantic Canada, Wiedemer said that this disaster serves as a lesson for all people, but especially pro-lifers, on the importance of compassion. Wiedemer said that although the hurricane was devastating, the disaster “can serve as an insight into the world of many who suffer crises in many ways. To understand the woman with an unexpected pregnancy or the one who might be contemplating ending their life, it helps to know the anxiety, fear and confusion that we all just went through. “It makes our hearts softer and more compassionate for the pains of our neighbours,” said Wiedemer. “I hope as a grace from this we will be a more compassionate place of love and life,” she continued. “That we will be able to give and receive with the grace of knowing I am loved and able to love. This will change the world and bring about a true culture
of life. By valuing and preserving the dignity of every single person at all ages and stages, we will all be truly living a life worthy of our humanity.” Wiedemer added that it is extremely difficult to communicate to current generations the message that each person is vulnerable at some stage in their life. “We need people and need support,” she said. “Hurricane Fiona made it clear to us all that everyone is vulnerable. This can bear great fruit for the pro-life movement in that many can now see how fate can change your situation unexpectedly and that each of us needs to give and receive help.” Wiedemer said that despite the struggles, tears, and inconveniences, the hurricane can lend a new outlook on the message of life. “Despite the damage and worry, we all experienced that good can be found in times of trouble,” she said. “This will help more women choose life for their babies and more families speak words of life to those considering endof-life issues.” Ruth Robert, coordinator of Campaign Life Coalition in Atlantic
Canada, told The Interim that the hurricane also affected another pro-life event, an abortion information session, at St. Thomas More parish in Dartmouth, N.S. that she hosted three days after Hurricane Fiona struck. She said that she was told that there were a few people who had wanted to come to her event, but were unable to due to power outages. This led to a “slight decrease in attendance,” but was otherwise unaffected. David Cooke, the New Brunswick-based campaigns manager for Campaign Life Coalition, also offered a message of hope to Canadians in Atlantic Canada who are now struggling to rebuild. “Always remember that ‘God is our refuge and strength, A very present help in trouble’,” he said. “As many work to rebuild their homes and businesses, God offers His loving grace to comfort and encourage those who put their faith in Him. He also reminds us of the greater challenge set before us – to work to undo the devastation wrought by abortion and euthanasia and to rebuild a culture of life in our nation.”
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THE INTERIM, NOVEMBER 2022— PAGE 7
2022
Life Chain Tecumseh, Ont.
Kelowna, B.C.
Red Deer, Albta.
Montreal, Que.
Bridgewater, N.S.
Saskatoon, Sask.
Mississauga, Ont.
Toronto, Ont.
Brandon, Man.
New Brunswick
Montreal, Que.
Toronto, Ont.
Courtesy of Kelowna Right to Life
Kelowna, B.C.
Courtesy of Kelowna Right to Life
Saskatoon, Sask.
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Photos used with permission
PAGE 8 — THE INTERIM, NOVEMBER 2022
Financial de-platforming Laying Down the Lawton Andrew Lawton
W
hen the Canadian government gave itself the authority to freeze its political critics’ bank accounts earlier this year, it should have rattled the confidence in the state held by the most trusting among us. You didn’t have to be a donor to the Freedom Convoy to realize the dangers of this sort of power. Though as is so often the case, those who feel such measures would never be wielded against them paid no heed. In October, fears of financial de-platforming were reignited when PayPal, the online payment processor and money exchange service, announced a policy that would empower the company to fine any of its users $2,500 if PayPal believed they were engaged in “misinformation,” among a litany of other digital sins. Conservatives saw this as an attack against them, especially since so much commentary on Covid these past almost three years has had those “misinformation” tags appended by social media companies, even if the posts prove prophetic later on. The backlash was swift, and PayPal days later said the whole thing was a misunderstanding (or perhaps misinformation itself ?). Even so, conservative PayPal users, the most sensitive, for obvious reasons, to Big Tech censorship, shut down their accounts in such large numbers the company had to throw up barriers to slow down the closures. These are the sorts of stories that challenge my libertarianism. If you don’t like it, don’t use PayPal, my instincts say. If you don’t like Facebook’s heavy-handed “fact checking,” don’t post there. If you don’t like Twitter’s periodic ideological culls, don’t build up a following there. Even if we all agreed social media companies have a legal right to do what they want, I reserve the right to call out the moral wrongness of it. When it comes to finances, I don’t see a legal or moral footing. Your money is yours, and that’s true whether you keep it sitting in a PayPal account, a CIBC account, or in a wad of cash under that loose floorboard in the guest bedroom. The last option notwithstanding, society is moving in a cashless direction, making it next to impossible to function in the world without a bank account. Imagine if your bank decided that it didn’t want to handle your money because of your political views. It’s not an altogether foreign concept. The American bank JP Morgan Chase cut ties with Kanye West last month over a string of controversial statements by the rapper. It’s a much ickier – and far more disruptive – decision than if Twitter just decided to vaporize West’s ability to tweet. The issue gets even murkier when one looks at the host of internet reforms Canada’s Liberals are entertaining, one of which would force technology platforms to zap content the government deems is hate speech. Is it all that difficult imagining someone getting de-platformed for making a comment about the immutability of biological sex or quoting a bible verse? Such things have already earned people Twitter bans. Financial de-platforming raises the stakes of the run-ofthe-mill Big Tech censorship to which most conservatives are now accustomed. I cannot help but feel small and powerless before some of these companies, but I’ve tried to put together a few responses to this. First, speak up. PayPal was clearly unnerved enough by the volume of cancellations that it backtracked on the policy. Organized boycott campaigns are often unsuccessful, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth a shot. Second, reject government’s intervention into this space. The only thing worse than private sector censorship is state censorship, I’ve often said. State-enforced private sector censorship somehow seems even worse, or at least more difficult to combat. Third, support alternatives. When GoFundMe cancelled the Freedom Convoy fundraiser, a Christian competitor, GiveSendGo was there to take the business. While this didn’t stop the government from taking aim at the money, the company stood firm. These are bandages over bullet holes, I realize, but they are all better than giving up and giving in. The mechanisms behind censorship are, in my view, less important than the cultural thrust behind censorship. It should be outrageous to civilized society that PayPal would dare threaten users based on political values, but instead too many people took solace in the fact that they didn’t think they engaged in wrong think and figured it wasn’t their battle to fight. Such a response will inevitably prove short-sighted, by which point there will be no one left to speak up for the naïve.
New focus for U.S. March for Life Oswald Clark
March for Life president Jeanne Mancini announced Oct. 13 that the theme of the 2023 march will center on moving into a postRoe world by re-routing the event to pass Congress rather than the Supreme Court, acknowledging that the abortion issue is now primarily a political rather than legal issue. The forthcoming March for Life will be the 50th anniversary of the first March for Life, which was organized by a group led by Nellie Gray in 1973 in response to the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision. It will be the first national pro-life march since the Supreme Court overturned Roe in its June 24 Dobbs decision. Following the Dobbs decision in June, the March for Life organization noted that their event was founded to demand an end to injustice of the Roe v. Wade decision: “after 50 years, we have finally reached that goal – but the fight to end abortion in our country is not over.” In Mancini’s October speech, it outlined its vision for the future of
the March for Life. During remarks at the Washington-based Heritage Foundation think tank, Mancini said she hopes prolifers will come out in force to celebrate the legal victory of overturning Roe v. Wade and press Congress to pass a ban on abortion.
March for Life president Jeanne Mancini
“We must tirelessly build a culture of life on Capitol Hill, and advocate for the advancement of federal pro-life policies,” Mancini said. “But it doesn’t end there: we must also march in our state capitols, urging our state legislators to pass life-saving protections for the unborn.”
Mancini said, "I want to thank all of you who’ve marched over the years, all of you who have borne witness to the poorest of the poor, the most vulnerable, the unborn by marching on the Capitol, by marching to the Supreme Court,” to turn their attention now to Congress. She said to pro-life Americans, "Your testimony marching in Washington, D.C., shutting down this city every year for the largest annual human rights demonstration worldwide has borne fruit,” she said. “It’s absolutely borne fruit in the overturn of Roe." She said, "This is a moment where our culture has been changed." Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts said in remarks during the same event that while "first and foremost, the fight does go to the states," yet he said that does not take congressmen off the hook, saying they cannot "give up the fight in the imperial city of Washington, D.C." In June, Crisis magazine editor Eric Sammons argued that the March for Life held in Washington on the anniversary of Roe
should be disbanded and the focus move to the state capitals on June 24, to mark the overturning of Roe, to energize local prolife efforts. Sammons wrote it would be better to have "50 concurrent Marches throughout the nation, but all focused at the state level" because "that is where the abortion battle is now, and we need to start putting more and more pressure on our state representatives to pass abortions bans." Campaign Life Coalition national president Jeff Gunnarson, who has attended the March in Washington, told The Interim that there is no reason that American prolifers cannot do both: "A national march in January and state-level marches in June would provide a two-pronged witness to the importance of passing prolife laws at the state level until national protection is established for all preborn children." The March for Life has, in fact, worked at both the national and state levels, holding marches for life in California, Pennsylvania, and Ohio since the Dobbs decision.
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This program makes it easy for you to save a life by using funds your Real Estate company has already earmarked for commission fees at no extra cost to you. Will your property be sold as part of your estate? Please consider indicating in your last will and testament your preference for selling the property using the Real Estate for Life program with Campaign Life Coalition as beneficiary.
Contact Dave Thiesen Real Estate for Life, an arm of Residential Property 1.877.543.3871 Consultants, was formed for the explicit purpose of giving donations to support Pro-life activities. proliferealestate@yahoo.com Your name is never sold, ever! RealEstateForLife.org
THE INTERIM, NOVEMBER 2022— PAGE 9
Paul Tuns
Trudeau, Joly trumpet abortion at UN
On Sept. 21, in remarks to reporters at the United Nations after addressing the General Assembly, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau once again declared his support for abortion, with his Foreign Minister, Melanie Joly, reiterating the message six days later at the UN. In response to a journalist's questions about what, if any limits Trudeau supported when it comes to abortion, the Prime Minister states "it is a fundamental tenet of freedom, (and) it is a fundamental tenet of our society that we stand up for women’s rights." He added, "in Canada, we support unequivocally, a woman’s right to choose." Trudeau said, "the idea that there are young girls in the United States who will grow up with less rights than over their own bodies than their mothers did is exactly what Canadians, Americans, and people all around the world are so concerned about." He added, "We need to make sure we are standing up for people’s rights and
freedoms, and in Canada we will do that by ensuring access to abortion for every Canadian who wants it and we will make sure we continue to fight for
part of "a global coalition in support of equality" that will "repel these increasing attacks on women's rights and freedoms" as she insisted, "Sexual and repro-
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau praises abortion as a "fundamental right" during a press conference at the United
better health and reproductive rights all around the world." As he continued to talk, Trudeau said the decision for "mothers" regarding abortion, "especially in late term" is made by doctors. Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly addressed the General Assembly on Sept. 27, and she said Canada is
ductive health rights for women and girls are being rolled back or denied in too many countries." In what was widely viewed as a broadside against the United States after the Supreme Court overturned Roe, Joly said: "We will speak up for your rights and dignity. No government, no politics, no judge — no
An illegal and unjustified overreaction
one can take that away from you." There was applause in the General Assembly after that remark. Joly concluded her remarks on abortion stating, "Canada will always stand up for your right to choose." Campaign Life Coalition communications director Pete Baklinkski said the speeches are the latest evidence of that "the Trudeau Liberals are pushing abortion at home and abroad (at the cost of hundreds of millions of your tax dollars per year)." Baklinski said, "Future generations will look back on our times in disbelief that killing babies was celebrated and so heavily promoted by political elites." Jeff Gunnarson, national president of CLC, told The Interim, "The truth is that abortion is the greatest human rights’ violation in the world and that it is a perversion of the United Nations' founding, predicated on securing a global peace and respect for all human rights, that the UN is the locus of so much abortion advocacy."
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Law Matters John Carpay
C
anadians remain divided about the Freedom Convoy truckers’ protest in Ottawa in January and February of 2022. Some Canadians saw the truckers as heroes resisting unjust laws, while government-funded media portrayed thousands of peaceful protesters as a harmful nuisance at best, and as dangerous racists and violent criminals at worst. I know people who live in Ottawa who tell me there was significant inconvenience for some individuals living in the downtown core. I have no reason to doubt their word. However, for 99 per cent (or more) of the 1,423,000 Ottawa-Gatineau residents, life went on quite normally while Canadians exercised their Charter freedoms of expression, association and peaceful assembly in their nation’s capital. The peaceful protests included parking trucks in the downtown core of Ottawa, honking horns, waving Canadian and Quebec flags, holding placards, a concert stage, singing and dancing, and bouncy castles for children. Tens of thousands of Canadians attended. Many more participated by giving truckers food and fuel, voicing support online and donating money to the cause. During this time, one Ottawa resident tried to set fire to an apartment building. Politicians and government-funded media seized on this as an “example” of how dangerous the protesting truckers were, but eventually the truth came out: Ottawa police admitted that the would-be arsonist had nothing to do with the out-of-town protesters. In contrast to the violent vandalism of a GasLink pipeline site in British Columbia (fires lit; roadway blocked with downed trees, tar covered stumps, boards with spikes in them) in February 2022, the Ottawa protests saw no looting, shooting, vandalism, or violence. Yet the Government of Canada declared a public order emergency under the Emergencies Act on February 14, 2022. The government then froze the bank accounts of hundreds of Canadians without due process, court oversight, or any opportunity for account owners to defend themselves against what amounted to accusations of funding terrorism or other violence. The police deployed horsemounted units, batons, and tear gas to disperse peaceful demonstrators, many of them suffering injuries as a result of the police action. Whether one agrees or disagrees with mandatory vaccination policies, this rather violent crack-down on a peaceful protest horrified people around the world, especially those who saw Canada as an advanced democracy which respects human rights and constitutional freedoms. This was the first time in Canadian history that the Emergencies Act was invoked. The other historical comparisons in Canada, under the former War Measures Act, include the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II, and a crack-down on members and supporters (and suspected members and supporters) of the violent, terrorist Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) in October 1970. Fortunately, the Emergencies Act requires that an inquiry into the declaration of emergency be held. The Public Order Emergency Commission is conducting this mandatory inquiry into the circumstances that led to the declaration of emergency and the government’s use of emergency powers. The Commission expects to hear from 65 witnesses through to late November. The Emergencies Act may only be invoked if the federal government has reasonable grounds to believe that a national emergency exists, and that it cannot be quelled by way of existing federal, provincial and municipal laws. The federal government will try to persuade the Commission that the truckers “seriously endangered” the lives, health or safety of Canadians, and that they did so in a way that exceeded “the capacity or authority of a province to deal with it.” On the first day of the inquiry hearing, Ontario Provincial Police lawyer Christopher Diana said "there was sufficient legal authority (in the absence of the Emergencies Act) to deal with the protest activities that took place.” Ottawa’s municipal bylaws, statutory injunctions under the Municipal Act, issuing tickets for violating the Highway Traffic Act and the Trespass to Property Act, civil remedies, and provincial emergency powers were tools at the government’s disposal. Instead of using these available tools, the government resorted to draconian measures which had previously been used to deal with bombs, kidnapping, hostage-taking and murder in Quebec; and to forcibly remove from the BC coast an ethnic minority suspected of being likely to support a war-time invasion by Imperial Japan. Those who love truth would be well-advised to watch the Commission’s proceedings closely. John Carpay is president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (jccf.ca), which is providing legal representation to several of the Freedom Convoy participants, and which has full participatory standing before the Commission.
PAGE 10 — THE INTERIM, NOVEMBER 2022
T OF T Mary Zwicker Back in May, Matt Walsh and the Daily Wire’s documentary What is a Woman? exposed the world to the reality of the transgender movement’s lies, and the dangers associated with it. In a world that accepts and even promotes an ideology that encourages people to sterilize themselves, mutilate their bodies, and live their lives as a lie, it is important to show that transgenderism is not as glamorous as it may seem, and to demonstrate the horrors that the transgender movement is not keen to show - and there are many such horrors. The transgender movement is not, as its promoters would have people believe, a liberating movement that seeks to perpetuate what is best for each individual. Conversely, transgenderism as a movement is deeply flawed, promoting and perpetrating an agenda that is inherently evil, and which harms, both mentally and physically (and often irreversibly), those who subscribe to its ideologies. Instead of addressing the root of the problem and searching for alternative routes, the transgender movement applauds the practice of mutilating and maiming children at a young age, pumping them full of hormones before they are able to consent, and risking their health, fertility, and very lives.
A dark and troubled past Gender theory provides the basis of today’s transgender ideology. The roots of gender theory are found in a dark and troubled past, beginning with the unethical research and the disturbing theories that were presented by two grisly figures, Alfred Kinsey and John Money during the early to the mid-20th century. A major influence on how society now views sexuality, Kinsey’s influential scholarship is rooted in disturbing and controversial research. He developed what is known as the Kinsey Scale, measuring sexual orientation. Between 1948 and 1953, Kinsey came out with his Kinsey Reports which, among other things, documented the orgasms of over 300 children. These children were as young as two-month-old infants and went up to 15-year-olds. This was done in the name of science, in order to show that, from infanthood, humans are inherently sexual creatures. Kinsey conveniently claimed to have gained this information from “other sources,” and so it was not until recently that his methods used in obtaining such conclusions were questioned. Kinsey is responsible for much of the modern outlook on sexuality, which, however, was due to faulty or fake research. Kinsey believed that people are sexual from birth, and that sexual experimentation is what really makes them happy. However, Kinsey’s research was later discovered to have been conducted almost entirely on sex predators, pedophiles, prostitutes, and prison inmates, as well as children. This would account for its radical (and fraudulent) conclusions, which were adopted as normal behavioural patterns and provided the basis for later gender theory to flourish and spread. Another figure associated with
the early transgender movement was John Money. Influenced by Kinsey, Money took his ideas of sexuality a step further into the idea of gender. Money is responsible for originally introducing terms such as gender identity, gender role, and sexual orientation into the realm of scholarship. Money was a psychologist and sexologist who once expressed support for pedophilia in a debate where he said that it was more than acceptable if it were “mutual” and “affectionate.” Perhaps the most horrific of his experiments was the case of the Reimer twins. After one of their twins, David, suffered a circumcision gone wrong, the devastated Reimer parents came to Money, who suggested that they reassign, transition, and raise David as a girl, to which they desperately agreed. At 22 months old, David underwent surgery to remove his testicles and was later also put on hormones. Money performed experiments on both twins that were nothing short of child abuse, forcing them to simulate different sexual actions for “research.” In a deep depression at age 14, David was finally told the truth about his past by his parents. He instantly changed his name to David and decided to live his life as a man. However, due to their traumatic upbringing, both brothers died young and mentally troubled: Brian of an overdose and David later on through suicide at the age of 38. Kinsey and Money represent the sad beginnings of what is now taught widely in schools and promoted as truth in today’s culture. What began as the sick experiments of two twisted individuals now constitutes the basis for the norms of modern society.
A medically unsound practice Despite the unsettling roots of transgenderism, this ideological movement continues to push its transhuman views on society. Unfortunately, the disturbing roots of transgender ideology are not the only part of this movement that is unsettling. The methods themselves employed in order to transition an individual are unsafe, medically unfounded, and have results that are often completely devastating. The process of transitioning begins with the administration of hormone blockers. In the case of a child who has not yet reached puberty, this halts the process of their bodies’ development of their secondary sex characteristics, thus making it “easier” for them to transition later on, without many of the surgeries necessary to remove characteristics such as developed breasts. If the person “transitioning” has passed puberty, they still take these hormone blockers to halt the production of the male or female hormones. After that comes the administration of either testosterone or estrogen in order to produce the desired masculinizing or feminizing effects. Sadly, while these hormones are marketed as “safe” and “reversible” by the medical practitioners who prescribe them, limited studies so far have shown that these hormones wreak havoc on the human body. People who need actual medical and psychological help are ignored and
instead taught that the only cure to their perceived illness is to change their bodies. Too often, no alternative route is pursued or even suggested, and there is no questioning into what the underlying causes of their gender dysphoria might possibly be. The only “help” that people receive is affirmative care. This means that individuals who really need psychological help are instantly affirmed and told that they can be cured if they reject their biological sex and begin the transformation process. These atrocities continue to occur despite the American College of Pediatricians warning that “there is not a single long-term study to demonstrate the safety or efficacy of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries for transgenderbelieving youth. This means that youth transition is experimental, and therefore, parents cannot provide informed consent, nor can minors provide assent for these interventions. Moreover, the best long-term evidence we have among adults shows that medical intervention fails to reduce suicide.” Other institutions also warn of the effects of hormone use on the body. Oxford University sociology professor Michael Biggs stated that “there was no statistically significant difference in psychosocial functioning between the group given blockers and the group given only psychological support. In addition, there is unpublished evidence that after a year on (puberty blockers) children reported greater self-harm, and the girls also experienced more behavioural and emotional problems and expressed greater dissatisfaction with their body—so puberty blockers exacerbated gender dysphoria.”
Harmful effects of hormone use However, while there are not many long-term studies on the effects of extended hormone use, there are many known side-effects to many of the drugs used in this process, and these effects are not good, ranging from loss of cogni-
tive abilities to infertility. One study published in Human Brain Mapping in 2010, stated that “when a child’s natural puberty is blocked, we can expect to see effects not only on the body but on the developing brain. It is the surge of sex hormones at puberty which triggers the important changes in the adolescent brain which only reach completion in the mid-twenties. Hormonal changes at puberty are thought to influence the development of both brain structure and function.” Many of the hormones used during transitioning also have severe health risks associated with them. Two of the main hormones prescribed to transitioners are testosterone and estrogen. Men who are trying to transition to appear female are prescribed estrogen; however, this comes with significant risks. Doctors do not even want to administer estrogen to women in menopause -who need it for serious reasons such as to help with their vaginal or uterine atrophies -- because the medical establishment knows and admits that it can cause pulmonary embolisms or strokes. Hormonal estrogen can also cause deep vein thrombosis, infertility, heart disease, and reduced bone density, among other things. Men will also experience decreased libido and testicular atrophy when on estrogen. For women who wish to appear male, there are also significant risks associated with the prescription of testosterone. A study published in the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology Canada in 2012 on the effects of testosterone on women stated that “the safety concerns of testosterone therapy include the potential for developing hirsutism, acne, behavioural and personality changes, breast cancer, endometrial cancer, hepatotoxicity, and potentially detrimental effects on cardiovascular health and bone health.” Studies have shown that the use of hormones is not only harmful to the health of the transitioner but that they can also affect them sexually, often leaving the victim sterile, prone to pain during intercourse, or unable to experience sexual pleasure.
THE INTERIM, NOVEMBER 2022— PAGE 11
THE DARK SIDE TRANSGENDERISM
However, according to testimonials from people who have regretted their transitions, none of these potential risks are discussed with the transitioning individual, and by the time they come to realize what they have done it is usually too late; the damage has been done, which is invariably irreversible. Biggs says in a video posted at Transgender Tend: “Puberty blockers followed by opposite sex hormones cannot create ‘opposite sex puberty,’ only secondary sex characteristics of the opposite sex. However, normal sexual or reproductive development will not occur. Girls will not begin menstruation and so will be infertile. Boys’ testes will not grow and develop and will impact on fertility. The change, therefore, is only cosmetic. A boy’s penis will remain immature and remain the size of that of a child into adulthood. This will cause problems sexually if the penis is retained, both functionally and in terms of sexual arousal. It is also problematic if gender reassignment surgery is later chosen since there is too little material to use from the penis and testicles.” Lupron, one of the many drugs administered to children as a puberty blocker, is a drug that has been used to chemically castrate pedophiles and other sex offenders. Studies show that the use of Lupron can result in conditions such as osteoporosis, fibromyalgia, blindness, depression, seizures, and -- why it is used as chemical castration -- sterility. This is an extremely dangerous drug, and the company has undergone countless court cases over the years because of patients whose lives were ruined due to its deadly effects. Now, this dangerous drug is being routinely used on young children, removing their ability to have children in the future and giving them critical health conditions before they can even consent or begin to understand the risks.
Long-term and irreversable effects President Joe Biden once said that “affirming a transgender child’s identity is one of the best things a par-
ent, teacher, or doctor can do to help keep children from harm, and parents who love and affirm their children should be applauded and supported, not threatened, investigated, or stigmatized.” However, it is exactly because just such an affirmative approach has been taken that so many lives have been destroyed by schools and by the medical profession in recent years. Children are not able to fully understand the long-term consequences and the irreversible effects of the transitioning process, and ought to be given counselling and aid instead of merely positive affirmation that mutilating their bodies is the correct step. (Even adults who are affirmed need to be aware of the root causes of their distress, not tell them to destroy themselves beyond repair.) The next step after being put on hormones for an assigned period of time is sex-reassignment surgery – what is often called sex-confirmation or gender-affirming surgery. Sex-reassignment surgery attempts to cosmetically alter the individual’s appearance in order to appear as the gender a person suffering gender dysphoria identifies with. For women, this would include anything from a double mastectomy or the removal of the breasts to a full hysterectomy, where the uterus is removed, often along with the ovaries and fallopian tubes. Some women may go so far as to undergo a “bottom surgery” in order to appear like a biological male in all regards. This involves enlarging the clitoris through hormone treatments in order to then transform it into a make-shift penis using skin grafted from another area of their body. For men, surgery includes the removal of the testicles and the creation of a fake vagina by inverting the penis. These surgeries are not only irreversible, but they leave the patient sterile forever. As a result of such surgeries, many transitioners experience incontinence, suffer from continued infections, run the risk of contracting STIs more easily, and frequently forego their ability to experience any sexual pleasure. Again, testimonies from de-transitioned individuals – men and women
who come to accept their biological sex after transitioning – make it clear that these side-effects are not normally shared with patients, in fact quite the opposite. While transgender activists, therapists, and surgical doctors reassure their patients that sex-reassignment surgery is perfectly safe, the results of such surgeries are devastating and are often not fully understood by youth and their families. A teen girl who removes her breasts cannot possibly fathom that one day she may want to breastfeed her children. Likewise, a young boy or girl who has their sexual organs removed cannot imagine that one day they may wish to have their own children and that this surgery forever ruins their chances of being a biological mother or father. Children are not yet mature enough to realize the consequences of such life-altering decisions, especially ones that can never be reversed. Scott Newgent, a woman who transitioned to appear as a male, appeared on Matt Walsh’s What is a Woman? to speak out against the transgender movement’s aggressive attack on children. In a heartbreaking plea for the world to wake to reality, Newgent described the medical process and the life-threatening risks associated with transitioning. “During my own transition, I had seven surgeries to change my appearance to male. As side effects, I also had a massive pulmonary embolism, a helicopter life-flight ride, an emergency ambulance ride, a stress-induced heart attack, sepsis, a 17-month recurring infection due to using the wrong skin during a (failed) phalloplasty, 16 rounds of antibiotics, three weeks of daily IV antibiotics, the loss of all my hair, (only partially successful) arm reconstructive surgery, permanent lung and heart damage, a cut bladder, insomnia-induced hallucinations— oh and frequent loss of consciousness due to pain from the hair on the inside of my urethra. All this led to a form of PTSD that made me a prisoner in my apartment for a year.” Newgent mourned the system’s attack on children and youth who are not equipped to understand the consequences and impact of the transition process. She went on to say that she would probably not live too long because of the consequences of her surgeries and treatments. Unfortunately, this heart-breaking tale is just one of many stories that show the devastating reality of the harm inflicted by the transgender movement.
Mental health Although the bodily effects of transitioning are heartbreaking, the mental health ramifications of such “treatment” are arguably much worse. Parents of children seeking to transition are routinely told by “health experts” that it is better to have a “live son than a dead daughter” or a “live daughter than a dead son.” This is a blatant lie. Studies that have followed the state of mental health in transgender people after their surgeries show that the highest rates of depression in transgender individuals come seven years after surgery, not before. Thus, not only does the transition process not help their mental health conditions, but it actually makes them worse.
A 2017 study in Sweden followed 324 individuals who medically transitioned between 1973 and 2003 – 191 male-to-female, 133 female-to-male -- in order to study the effects of transitioning on mental health. The study concluded that “persons with transsexualism, after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behaviour, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population. Our findings suggest that sex reassignment, although alleviating gender dysphoria, may not suffice as treatment for transsexualism, and should inspire improved psychiatric and somatic care after sex reassignment for this patient group.”
Awakening to reality While things may sound hopeless, there are some who are waking up to the dangers of transgender ideology, and the destruction it wreaks on children and their families. In the United Kingdom, England’s National Health Services (NHS) announced earlier this year that it will be shutting the doors of the Tavistock Clinic by 2023. This is due to the conclusions of a report on the clinic that said that Tavistock, the country’s sole facility to transition self-identifying transgender children, was neither “safe” nor “viable” as an option for confused youth. Following an official NHS review, it found parents of children whose lives have been ruined by their transitions through the clinic claimed that the Tavistock Clinic “recklessly prescribed puberty blockers with harmful side effects” and that it affirmed the children without question. One whistleblower said that there was an ideological commitment to accept every child’s claim to be the opposite of their biological sex and that psychological and psychiatric treatment for mental health issues were routinely skipped over in the rush to transition early adolescents. Now, more than 1,000 families have joined in a lawsuit against the clinic, seeking reparation for the irreversible harm inflicted upon their families and upon their children. A lawyer representing the families suing the Tavistock Clinic Gender and Identity Development Service because of their approach to “treating” their children, described Tavistock’s rushed diagnosis in the following words: “Children and young adolescents were rushed into treatment without the appropriate therapy and involvement of the right clinicians, meaning that they were misdiagnosed and started on a treatment pathway that was not right for them. These children have suffered life-changing and, in some cases, irreversible effects of the treatment they received.” While Tavistock’s closure provides a beacon of hope to those who wish to see the atrocities committed against children (and adults) stopped, the harsh reality is that this is a rarity, especially in North America. As schools, large swathes of the medical establishment, and, increasingly, society at large continue to promote and even encourage transgender ideology, more and more people are convinced to subscribe to this health and life-threatening charade.
PAGE 12 — THE INTERIM, NOVEMBER 2022
Welcome to our nightmare: Blonde goes against the grain on abortion Amusements Rick McGinnis
B
londe – Andrew Dominik’s “film about, but not a biopic of ” Marilyn Monroe – was released on Netflix in September to what you could generously call mixed reviews. The Los Angeles Times called it a “torture porn biopic” while the Guardian called it “a hellish vision.” NPR described it as “an exercise in exploitation, not empathy,” and Esquire’s headline read “Garish, Unfair and No Fun At All.” Based on a novel by Joyce Carol Oates and starring Ana de Armas as the blonde bombshell whose tragic life story is still talked about today, more than 60 years after her death, it was described by its director as “a work of fiction” and by Netflix as “a fictional portrait.” It only glancingly sticks to the facts of the life of Marilyn Monroe but is really, in the words of British movie critic Mark Kermode in the Guardian, “a horror movie masquerading as a movie about fame” – and Kermode’s review was one of the more positive ones. But the most pointed criticism was summed up by Rae Torres in Collider – a review whose headline describes Dominik and Oates’ take on Monroe as an “Anti-Choice Narrative” that “Makes an Already Problematic Film Even Worse.” The problem, says Torres, is that Blonde gets “absolutely everything wrong about abortion.” They criticize Dominik for depicting Monroe’s still developing fetus as a fully formed infant in the womb, and for using “anti-choice cliches” like talking about keeping a baby as “the right thing.” To underline this irresponsible “propaganda,” the writer quotes Caren Spruch, national director of arts and entertainment engagement at Planned Parenthood, who called upon her organization’s most cherished talking points and told The Hollywood Reporter that: “Planned Parenthood respects artistic license and freedom. However, false images only serve to reinforce misinformation and perpetuate stigma around sexual and reproductive health care. Every pregnancy outcome—especially abortion—should be portrayed sensitively, authentically and accurately in the media. We still have much work to do to ensure that everyone who has an abortion can see themselves onscreen. It is a shame that the creators of Blonde chose to contribute to anti-abortion propaganda and stigmatize people’s health
care decisions instead.” There’s no denying that Blonde is an ordeal to sit through, even – or especially – if you aren’t offended by its frequent departures from historical fact. It’s a harrowing experience, a nightmare in feel and structure, and at its most horrifying during its two abortion scenes, one early in the film, after Monroe gets pregnant during a threesome with the sons of two Hollywood legends, the second time (it’s implied) by President John F. Kennedy.
of Monroe was nowhere near as radioactive when Oates’ novel came out in 2000, and over the last two decades stars such as Naomi Watts and Jessica Chastain were in contention to play the title role. In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Dobbs, overturning Roe v. Wade, however, Dominik’s movie was destined (but probably not calculated) to be as welcome as Jordan Peterson at an Elizabeth Warren rally. Seven years ago, I wrote here about an episode of the TV show Scandal, where the main character takes time from her busy schedule as a political crisis manager in Washington D.C. during the Christmas season to get an abortion. (Oddly enough, getting rid of a baby fathered by a Republican U.S. president. We’ve talked about “the Imperial Presidency” for decades now; it would seem that presidential bastards are as unwelcome as those fathered by princes and kings.) I saw this show as a sign that Hollywood was going to start being more proactive about depicting abortion positively onscreen, and that it would henceforth be “taking a calculated risk that television, which has atomized its audience share into smaller, niche market segments, can afford to be more explicit in its social and political messaging, and advocate for still-divisive causes like abortion and potentially carve away further audience share.” Blonde arrived on the scene when the battle lines have been drawn deeply, and when wearing t-shirts reading “I love my abortion” or even “I killed my baby” are poised to replace the now-ragged and unraveling knitted “pink pussy hat” as the fashion accessory for political rally attendees. It’s one thing to “respect artistic license and freedom,” another to make an audience really feel the horror of a medical procedure that ends a life, and makes regret over it feel like trauma. Dominik’s film arrived on Netflix a contender for multiple Oscar nominations – de Armas’ performance, far more than the usual breathy impersonation of Monroe, certainly deserves one. The hand-wringing disapproval of most of the reviews might sabotage it before nominations are announced, never mind by the time the winners are read out at the ceremony. More to the point, Blonde’s violation of the industry’s new consensus will probably scuttle any chance of a statuette, out of fear that applauding its baleful vision of Marilyn Monroe’s private life will be seen as giving approval to the notion that ending a life before it’s begun is the stuff of nightmares.
Armond White, in the National Review, writes that “when the CIA secretly aborts Monroe’s JFK zygote, Blonde climaxes as political porn. Conservatives needn’t get excited that Marilyn is sacrificed on the abortion table (Dominik innovates a from-the-inside view of a vaginal curette), because the film’s process is inherently dehumanizing.” You have to admire Dominik for wading so forthrightly into what he might not have imagined would be a sea of “We have in Harley Price an controversy. This particular take on the life and myth authentic voice of conservatism.
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THE INTERIM, NOVEMBER 2022— PAGE 13
Liberal critique of birth control Mary Zwicker Review A new feminist, left-wing documentary on the topic of birth control has been released … but it’s not what you would expect. The new film, produced by Ricki Lake’s production company and directed by Abby Epstein, is called The Business of Birth Control, and it provides an in-depth analysis of the history of hormonal birth control, concluding that women need to stop taking it. The creators, while self-professed “pro-choice” and pro-nonhormonal-birth control, said that they created the movie to ensure that women can make an informed decision about what they are putting into their bodies. While the movie was not meant as a political statement and is not a pro-life movie per se, it does emphasize a critical point that the pro-life movement has stood by since the very beginning: that contraception hurts women. “Birth control is so inexplicably tied into our freedom as women,” the movie begins. “But at what cost?” Following the progression of modern birth control from its early roots in World War II to the present day, The Business of Birth Control gives an over-arching and realistic glimpse at the history of hormonal birth control, and specifically at the dangers that it has posed and continues to pose to women’s health. “We’re not setting women
free, we’re setting them up for disease,” says physician Erika Schwartz. “We’re setting them up for a lot of problems!” “When you look at hormonal birth control, there is a long laundry list of side effects,” said one of the women, Sarah E. Hill, a PhD who has studied extensively women’s health. These side effects include “anxiety and increased risk of depression, painful sex, low libido to nutrient depletion, migraine headaches, weight gain, insomnia, clitoral shrinkage, and even the impact it has on partner attraction.” However, these side
great depth to expose the lies and deceit promulgated by the pharmaceutical industry during the stages of the history of hormonal birth control, showing how it marketed highly lucrative products as ‘safe despite the countless deaths, blood clots, and serious health side effects that it well knew were associated with it. “The revolution that started with a simple pill has begun a multi-billion dollar business,” the movie’s narrator states. The movie also delves into the racist foundations of birth control, which was promoted as a form of
"We want people to have information ... real information," says one source interviewed for the documentary The Business of Birth Control.
effects are among the least serious that the movie covers. Fibroids, endometriosis, polycystic ovary syndrome, infertility, blood clots, higher risk of stroke, pulmonary embolisms, heart attacks, and lastly, death are among the many shocking and horrific effects of which “the number one culprit in all of these issues is the birth control pill.” The movie also goes in
eugenics in the early 20th century by the founder of Planned Parenthood. From the beginning, with its clinical trials conducted on impoverished women from Puerto Rico, to its use by the American government to control black populations, the pill has a dark history of racism. The movie exposes the horrors of such women who died during the trials, as well
as the heartbreak of those who were sterilized forever by a movement that wanted to practice eugenics. While overarchingly dark in general, the film has a few especially heart-breaking moments when showing the interviews of three different families who lost their daughters due to complications arising from the birth control pill. These families are now fighting for awareness of the dangers of birth control. While not meant as a political statement, The Business of Birth Control has received a lot of flack from those on the Left who say that the film is guilty of “fear-mongering” instead of showing both sides of the story. However, the producers said that they are attempting to show the side that is never shown so that women can make an informed decision, knowing that hormonal birth control can harm, and even kill, the women who use it. The Business of Birth Control also examines why the Left rarely discusses the risks of birth control: “The left will not consider the possibility that there are any dangers associated with hormonal contraceptives because it damages the push for reproductive access and reproductive care,” said one woman in the documentary, commenting on why such information is often left undiscussed by feminists and other progressives. “And that’s important, and women should have that. But women are dying. And I think women are smart enough that if you gave them the information, they’d say yes or no.” Overall, while The Business of Birth Control is not a prolife documentary, it does provide an essential insight into a topic that is too often ignored by the Left. Mary Zwicker is a reporter for The Interim.
Block, pro-life groups vow to continue fight
continued from p. 3 without taking something away from others. The protection of conscience rights does just this by ensuring lawmakers can, in good conscience, give access to certain medical procedures without unjustly compromising the existing freedoms exercised by others." In March, several Conservative MPs, including Michael Cooper (St. Albert-Edmonton) and Glen Motz (Medicine HatCardston-Warner) submitted petitions on behalf of Canadians concerned about conscience rights. Liberal MP Marcus Powlowski (Thunder BayRainy River), who had previously expressed concern about the expansion of euthanasia during parliamentary debate last March, voted against C-230. Liberal MP John MacKay (Scarborough-Guildwood) did not vote. Four Conservative MPs were not present for the vote and three of them -- deputy leader Melissa Lantsman (Thornhill), Eric Duncan (Stormont-DundasSouth Glengarry), and Dave Epp (Chatham-Kent— Leamington) -- later said they would have voted for C-230 if they were present in the House of Commons. Lantsman, who was not in the House because it was Yom Kippur, rose to speak in favour of C-230 on Sept. 29, saying, "The bill we are debating today is worth more than a casual dismissal, as I have heard done in this debate by so many." After the vote Block released a statement, saying, "There is a growing concern among many medical professionals, regardless of whether they support the practice or not, that they may be forced to participate in MAiD due to the expanding eligibility." Block added: "This is doubly concerning to those professionals who
may feel obligated to provide it, even if they do not believe it is in a particular patient’s best interest based on their knowledge of the patient’s medical history." Block concluded her statement saying "With today’s vote, Canadians have once again been shown that only Conservative Members of Parliament will defend their fundamental rights and freedoms." The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada said, "No medical professional should be forced to participate in taking the life of a patient," and Campaign Life Coalition said the fight for conscience protection for all medical professionals for all procedures, including abortion and gender-transitioning, will continue. Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, said in a statement, "Thank you Kelly Block for championing the rights of medical practitioners’ conscience rights." He added, "The need for conscience rights has not ended," because, "Conscience rights are fundamental freedoms that are protected by Section 2 of Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms." He explained that the constantly expanding euthanasia license underlines the importance of conscience rights and worries that without a law explicitly protecting them, they will be undermined by the supposed right to euthanasia. Schadenberg said, "conscience rights are essential to protect patients" because "when someone is living with a chronic or life limiting illness they will often be emotionally or psychologically affected by the experience (and) conscience rights enable a physician to freely protect patients and enable them to live through their crisis."
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An economist tackles the tough decisions in life
Wild Problems: A Guide to Decisions That Define Us by Russ Roberts (Portfolio, $36, 207 pages) Paul Tuns Review
Russ Roberts is the host of the EconTalker podcast, author of numerous books about economics, and president of Shalom College in Jerusalem. After spending most of his life applying the rules of economics as taught at the University of Chicago -- the importance of tradeoffs and opportunity cost (what we give up to gain something) -- he has, recently, turned his eye more to questions that resist measurement. In Wild Problems, Roberts examines the questions in one's life that are not easily answered by making a list of pros and cons to rationally tabulate which outcome would be optimal from a utilitarian point of view (maximizing pleasure, minimizing pain). These are the "big decisions in life" such as "whether to marry, who to merry, whether to have children, what career path to follow, how much time to devote to friends and family, how to resolve daily ethical dilemmas" -- the "fork in the road of life where knowing which path is the right one isn't obvious." These are decisions that define who we are. A running example throughout the book is Charles Darwin's pro and con list of whether to marry. Darwin listed among the benefits of marriage "children," "constant companion" and "someone to take care of house" while the benefits of not marrying included "not forced to visit relatives" and not having the "expense and anxiety of chil-
dren." The problem with this approach is properly weighing the costs and benefits; Benjamin Franklin encouraged a friend to guess the relative weights so a simple tabulation of the number of pros and cons doesn't ignore the outsized benefits or costs. Spelling out such a decision this way appears rational but it is not; it is an obviously silly, perhaps even futile exercise. While Darwin could reasonably expect that children do, indeed, present increased expenses and anxieties, a non-parent cannot fully appreciate the immense joys that children incite in parents. The problem, Roberts notes, is that we are "in the dark about the future" and worse we are "in the dark about how much darkness" there is. That is, we are ignorant and do not know how ignorant we are. Roberts writes about L.A. Paul's book Transformative Experience in which the author uses the metaphor of becoming a vampire to analyze big decisions; Paul says it is not possible to imagine what life is like as a vampire before becoming one, and that after becoming a vampire, our likes and dislikes would change. So, do you make a decision based on your current likes and dislikes or future ones? Likewise, we are in the dark about how we will feel about life as a parent or spouse, nor is it easy to prioritize which set of pros and cons to favour in advance of momentous decisions. Roberts discusses Persi Dioconis, a professor who must make a decision about moving from Stanford to Harvard, and while both are prestigious universities, there is a difference between being a Harvard professor and a Stanford professor. All Diaconis knew first-hand was being a Stanford professor while all he could know about being one from Harvard was based on second-hand information and his best guess at what he might feel being a Harvard professor. The problem is that we are not very good at predicting how we will feel ("expected utility" in economics jargon). Rationality is not much help, Roberts notes, "if you don't know what its like to experience one of the choices you're
facing." Wild Problems is like a selfhelp book for big decisions written by an economist who is trying to expand how economists (and readers) think about wild problems. Roberts offers a few techniques and a large piece of advice. The techniques include flipping a coin on really tough decision; not to make the decision but to gauge the reaction to the outcome as the emotions felt after the coinflip might reveal what is not consciously understood. Understanding that what works for one person might not work for another; we are not all cut out to be parents or move to another country to chase a promotion at work. Eschew transactional approaches to friendship; value friends independent of the pleasures they provide. Get over yourself; decisions become more complex, but that complexity can be met by understanding that one is aware he is not the center of the universe (so learn techniques of selfawareness). Privilege your principles; "do the right thing simply because you think you should" because no calculus cancels out "betraying who you are or who you aspire to be." Follow rules; "they reduce the time deliberating and trying to measure those pesky, hard-to-measure costs and benefits." Be like New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick; have humility about what can be known and develop strategies for coping with uncertainty (Belichick trades for more draft picks because he knows that drafting NFL-quality football players out of college is difficult, so quantity is valued for perceived quality). The big piece of advice is to understand, "human beings care about more than the day-to-day pleasures and pains of daily existence.” In addition to seeking pleasures and avoiding pains, Roberts explains: “We want purpose. We want meaning. We want to belong to something larger than ourselves. We apsire. We want to matter." These larger – one might say grander -- desires transcend easy cost-benefit analysis but "are at the heart of a life well lived." We should as individuals make choices that enable our flourishing which
Roberts defines as "becoming something beautiful and worthy of admiration," by "taking our circumstances and making the most of them in fulfilling our human potential." Roberts quotes Adam Smith, founding father of modern economics (and the subject of Roberts's last book, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life), who said in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, "man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely." Roberts explains Smith meant “to be lovely” is to be “worthy of praise, appreciation, admiration, and respect." Roberts runs throughs various major life decisions to explore how they fit in with human flourishing, and one worth noting is voting. Roberts says that rationally speaking voting does not make any sense because a single vote will not make a difference in any election. Still the majority of people take part in the civic exercise because they believe that the duties of citizenship outweigh the cost of taking the time to go down to the voting booth. In a niggling criticism of Roberts (who makes no pretense of being exhaustive in his considerations of various life decisions), he ignores the fact that many citizens vote because it is a way for them to express their virtues and to recognize humanity’s meaning and purpose by supporting candidates that would optimize human flourishing. The fact that any single vote is highly unlikely to influence the outcome is less important than the story we tell ourselves about our priorities when we vote. The attributes that most influence this flourishing -"integrity, virtue, purpose, meaning, dignity, and autonomy" -- elude easy quantification. Roberts resists the economic way of thinking that would just somehow find a measure of these attributes to make them rationally utilitarian. They are more mysterious than the traditional economic way of thinking can appreciate. Indeed, Roberts concludes observing that wild problems are “not problems to be solved but mysteries to be experienced, tasted, and savored.” Understanding this makes life richer.
O’Toole excluded continued from p. 3
that social conservative ideas are to be excluded in public policy and legislation.” Two high profile Conservative MPs were not given critics jobs: former Conservative leader Erin O'Toole who publicly
claimed he did not want a shadow cabinet job and Ed Fast (Abbotsford), who is green-lit by CLC but held high-profile positions in both the Jean Charest and Peter MacKay campaign in the most recent leadership races.
THE INTERIM, NOVEMBER 2022— PAGE 15
Books of the Day The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas Gal Beckerman (Crown, $39, 331 pages) Gal Beckerman’s The Quiet Before examines how radical ideas are born, stir, rise, and eventually influence the general public. Beckerman argues that for ideas to grow in popularity, they must be sustained by a small group of committed believers who share them through smaller circulation media such as pamphlets, speeches, conversations, and small-circulation publications, where they are refined and find adherents before making their way to the attention of a broader public in mass publication daily papers or the speeches of mainstream politicians. Interestingly, Beckerman argues that the internet is not an ideal venue to the development of radical ideas because of the very nature of online existence: loud, performative, self-indulgent, and fast-paced. Ideas are originally deliberated in a “whisper” according to Beckerman -- hence “The Quiet Before.” The noisy clamour of social media is hardly the ideal setting for deliberation. Twitter, Facebook and online discussion groups cannot “incubate” new ideas. The first few chapters look at the incubation of several radical ideas (the development of a way of measuring longitude, Italian Futurist movement, Russian samizdata newsletters) and there is quite a mixed record of success and failure in his examples. The real lesson (lost on Beckerman) is that deliberating and distributing ideas is hardly a guarantee of success. Fast-forward to today and the world of instant self-gratification through online experiences which Beckerman says is at odds with developing radical new ideas. This seems to be painting with too brod a brush because along with the possibility of self-indulgence on such platforms is constant and instant feedback, through which deliberation can take place. “For all the power social media has lent to movements,” says Beckerman, “it has also stunted them.” The same could be said of many of his romanticized examples. History if full of dissident published manifestos that went nowhere. Beckerman is correct in one assessment of online activism however: “The hard work of hammering out ideology and organizational structure, the building of a strong identity and the setting of goals, all of it can be leaped over, creating movements with all the depth and solidity of a raised-fist emoji.” Genuine activism requires work harder than liking a meme online or participating in an online debate. Curing Mad Truths: Medieval Wisdom for the Modern Age Rémi Brague (Notre Dame, $34 pb, 142 pages) The French Catholic conservative Rémi Brague’s latest English-language book, Curing Mad Truths -- based on a series of lectures to English-speaking audiences -- examines the fundamental problems with modernity and finds the cure for the errors of modern man’s ways in the Middle Ages. Brague identifies the central error of modernity as the loss of any semblance that humanity is intrinsically valuable. Modernity ignores or misses that intrinsic value because modernism conceives history and human endeavour as a “project” and projects turn human experience – sometimes human being themselves -- into experiments. Brague observes, “Whenever the idea of a project plays the lead, the very figure of Truth changes,” because truth is merely a representation of prevailing power structures in the on-going experiment(s) of history. This is a powerful observation. Brague concedes that there have been post-Medieval developments worth preserving (health, peace, and liberty), but insists that a reclamation of Medieval beliefs about man and God must displace the secular understandings that have come to dominate western culture today. A return to the Middle Ages is not a return to the cartoonish vision of the time as the Dark Ages, but a recapturing of the Medieval sense that mankind and the planet he inhabits are created not by chance but by a benevolent God. Mankind must be viewed a part of Creation and thus imbued with meaning and value. There is hope because, as Brague explains, rediscovering and reintegrating virtues (based on the Commandments) must take place in the family, which has been diminished by the forces of the state and market, meaning we all have the power to help turn things around. Curing Mad Truths is not “an easy read,” as it is full of etymologies and the minutiae of Christian theology and Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy (that the Good is not merely something we do but something we are) but those so disposed will benefit richly from Brague’s critique of modernity.
PAGE 16 — THE INTERIM, NOVEMBER 2022
Books of the Day The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Greatness, Courage and Moderation Daniel J. Mahoney (Encounter, $41, 231 pages) Daniel Maloney, a political philosopher whose byline appears regularly in conservative publications exploring big ideas, has written a highly readable book examining statesmanship through the lens of exemplary figures as Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle and Vaclav Havel, with insights gleaned Aristotle, Cicero, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher. Maloney eschews the politics of power and the nihilistic bases for it provided by Machiavelli and Nietzsche, instead harkening to the ideas in antiquity that politics should be properly ordered on virtue. Maloney observes, “if one reduces every argument to a pretense for domination and exploitation, one necessarily ends with the self-enslavement of man.” Such nihilism, he argues, “cannot provide a foundation for common humanity, the civic common good, or mutual respect and accountability.” (Is it any wonder that politics is now viewed even by voters as a zero-sum game in which “owning” the opponent is more important than securing the foundations for a flourishing society?) Maloney examines how the aforementioned statesmen demonstrated magnanimity, generosity, chivalry, and other virtues to rise above mere power politics to govern or provide guidelines about how to govern for the common good. Burke said the ends of politics was “manly, moral, regulated liberty.” To serve those ends, the statesman must be sober-minded, classically educated and historically aware, and virtuous. Not perfect, for Maloney makes none of his subjects to be saints, but rather demonstrates that they strove to live upright lives. It is hard to imagine how power-hungry would exercise these virtues. If there is one virtue that rises above all others in Maloney’s telling, it is prudence, or practical wisdom -- reasoning from first principles, treating others with respect as one would wish to be treated by others, self-discipline, understanding of current conditions and historical antecedents. Prudence was necessary for Lincoln to abolish slavery and Havel to drag Czechoslovakia from communism to freedom. The cult of equality and what Roger Scruton called the “culture of repudiation” work to counter the cultivation of virtues necessary for genuine statesmanship, but Mahoney remains optimistic that we will once again see genuine statesmen-thinkers. Faith, Force, and Reason: An Armchair History of the Rule of Law David M. Beatty (University of Toronto Press, $40 pb, 336 pages) David M. Beatty, professor emeritus in the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto, has written a truly remarkable and valuable book, Faith, Force, and Reason. In the preface he sets out his project: “This is a book about the rule of law. Its purpose is to explain, in a way everyone can understand, what law is and the method and reach of its rule.” Beatty delivers on his promise. With the general reader in mind, Beatty traces the birth of law in ancient Babylon, Israel, Greece, and Rome, and follows the idea through to the International Court of Justice in The Hague and the transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa. Starting at the beginning, Beatty notes, the law was essential to urban living in ancient Mesopotamia. Initially the “priestly class had most of the power when it came to coordinating the lives of these original urban dwellers” and there is ample record that contracts, wills, and court proceedings were “an important part of every level of these societies.” Beatty follows the development of the rule of law from Hammurabi to Mandela, spanning nearly four millennia, with all the major milestones from Justinian’s Corpus Juris Civila to the Magna Carta, from the renaissance of the law in the Bologna and Rome in the Middle Ages to the U.S. Bill of Rights, with a cast of characters as diverse as Socrates, Hugo Grotius, and Edward Coke. Usefully, Beatty describes the three central principles of the rule of law: “rules and commands take on legal force only where they meet basic formal requirements” such as being “general, transparent, and prospective”; “the purpose of the law is to encourage people to behave respectfully toward one another and settle their conflicts peacefully”; and “the sovereignty of law is universal,” as binding on rulers as much as the ruled. The history of the rule of law is as much about the absence of it as its adherence, and Beatty notes when countries and constitutions do not quite live up to the ideal or leaders and circumstances outright banish any semblance of the rule of law.
Population growth is good Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet by Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley (Cato Institute, $45, 547 pages) Paul Tuns Review
Worries about "overpopulation" are always followed by demands for population control to prevent the growing mass of people from stripping the planet bare. The problem with that line of thinking according to Marian Tupy of the Cato Institute and Gale Pooley of the Discovery Institute, authors of the new book Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation and Human Flourishing on an
Infinitely Bountiful Planet, is that people have not just mouths to feed but brains to think. Echoing the late Julian Simon, Tupy and Pooley argue that people are the ultimate resource because mankind is an innovating species, so problems are solved when there are more potential problem-solvers. The authors approvingly quote George Gilder who said “knowledge is wealth.” Tupy and Pooley expand on Simon's famous analysis that the most important input to the exploitation of the planet’s resources is ideas and his bet with population doomsayer Paul Ehrlich, in which Simon predicted that a basket of commodities would go down in price in the 1980s indicating that human ingenuity would make the resources cheaper on global markets. Ehrlich predicted a demand-based strain on commodities would lead to price increases. Not only did the basket of commodities decrease over the decade, all five commodities declined in price, and Simon won the bet. Tupy and Pooley look at a larger range of goods over a longer period of time (for some products going back nearly two centuries), in 40 countries, and found that
more people are consuming more goods and that real prices are falling (really!) over time when measured by how much labour is required at average wages to buy a particular good over time ("time-prices"). The authors have determined that a basket of 50 commodities from tea to uranium has fallen by 72 per cent since 1980 when measured this way. The time-price for manufactured goods has fallen even quicker (it took a typical worker 828 hours to buy a flat-screen television in 1997 but just 4.6 hours in 2019). Tupy and Pooley's novel approach also allows economists, historians, and social scientists to measure progress in different locations over time, and there is much good news to be found. While the gap in time that a typical Indian and American family worked to purchase rice has grown slightly between 1960 and 2018, both have to work dramatically less to put food on the table. In 1960, the Indian family had to work for seven hours to put rice on the table, while the American family needed one hour; in 2018, the respective figures were 58 minutes and 7.5 minutes. Yes, the Indian family worked 7.7 times longer
to feed the household as American families did in 2019, compared to seven times longer seven decades earlier, but the Indian family also saves nearly six hours of wages for something other than buying rice. This is great news, but it has become a fact of life on planet Earth so it does not produce headlines about the progress made over the past two hundred years, and more dramatically in recent decades, in decreasing poverty and improving the lives of the middle class. The authors note, "When basic things get more abundant, it’s the poor who benefit the most." If the authors stopped there, Superabundance would be a remarkable work of scholarship, but they also model how timeprices correspond with population growth and they found that for every one per cent increase in population, there was about a one per cent decrease in time-price. In other words, they've proven that population growth is good for mankind; they’ve disproven the erroneous thinking of two or three generations of policymakers that viewed a growing population as a problem to be solved rather than a source of human flourishing.
The biography Ted Byfield deserves Prairie Lion: The Life & Times of Ted Byfield by Jonathon Van Maren (Christian Heritage Press, $19.50, 247 pages) Paul Tuns Review
When Jonathon Van Maren set out to write the biography of Ted Byfield, he was amazed that one had not already been written. As the author notes, if Byfield had floated in the stream of fashionable opinion, he would have been showered with honours including the Order of Canada, but because he was a leading critic of the Sexual Revolution, Big Government, and the Laurentian Elite, his numerous accomplishments and influence on the Canadian media and political landscape have been belittled or ignored. Prairie Lion benefits from not merely being an intellectual history that explores Byfield’s ideas or a Wikipedia entry of his numerous endeavours, but from the access Van Maren had to the Byfield family including many conversations with the subject himself to provide a complete picture of who Ted Byfield was. There are recollections of Byfield’s childhood in Toronto, entry into journalism, marriage and
devotion to Virginia (Ginger), pivot to education including the opening of new Anglican schools, eventual return to journalism with the creation of the Alberta Report and its sister publications born out of publications began at his St. John’s schools in Edmonton and Calgary, and shift to publishing book series on the histories of Alberta and Christianity. Rather than a list of successes and (and some failures – Van Maren notes that it has been said of Byfield that he was a great entrepreneur but lousy businessman), we have a portrait of an actual person. Van Maren writes that “Ted’s Christianity …was more than lip service” and manifested itself in more than his public positions on sexual morality or other political views. He and Ginger read the Bible and “sought to apply it to their lives in practical ways” including taking “drunks, jailbirds and other riffraff ” who had nowhere to go into their home. Byfield told Van Maren, “You can’t read the New Testament and try to apply it without realizing that when God puts people like that in your path, you’re supposed to do something with it.” Byfield was not only a believer in Christianity, although it suffused everything he did; he knew the value of a classical education and historical perspective, as well as physical fitness and outdoor adventure. He took long, regular walks; he took family and students for hikes and canoeing; he bought a small yacht with dreams of global adventures that ended after his early misadventure from Vancouver to eastern Canada by way of the Caribbean. These stories bring Byfield to life.
What will be of most interest to Interim readers is Byfield’s founding of Alberta Report (eventually the editorship was passed to Ted’s son Link) and the Christian book series. There is no shortage of adventure in these endeavours as Van Maren explains the difficulties Ted Byfield had securing the finances to get these ventures off the ground and keep them running. For a while, Alberta Report writers were paid a dollar-a-day and given room and board, living life more akin to a hippy commune than the epicenter of western conservatism. When Ted Byfield created Alberta Report in 1979 out of his St. John’s Edmonton Report and St. John’s Calgary Report – St. John’s were the Anglican schools Byfield founded in Alberta -- it was a direct challenge to the chain newspapers and their left-liberal biases. Byfield told Van Maren, “We would exercise the opportunity to point out the moral implications not often mentioned by the daily papers,” with the author adding “by reporting from an implicitly Christian perspective rather than an explicit one, Ted soon began to garner a larger audience.” Byfield said the Report magazines would often explore what the large
dailies wrote about but had been poorly covered and then provide “the big picture.” Steve Weatherbe – one of many journalists who gained journalism experience under the Byfields – explains “we presented as a secular newsmagazine … but one which treated religious affairs as very important.” On a variety of issues, Alberta Report provided a refreshing take, challenging abortion-on-demand, growing secularism, the homosexual agenda, and imperious schools. At a time when the mainstream press was ignoring gay activism, the Report saw it as a threat and reported frequently on the efforts of activists to infiltrate schools and bureaucracies. Van Maren notes that “the pro-life issue was frequently a cover story” and Byfield’s magazine did not shy away from vividly telling the truth. Weatherbe says Byfield “fought the zeitgeist valiantly and apparently lost,” adding: “There are worse things.” Byfield would disagree, noting that victory has already been won by Christ. Van Maren’s story of Byfield paints him not as some pugilist looking for ideological fights, but a happy warrior sharing his faith in Christ with the world.
And then there was this … Mobile abortuaries The U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and returned the regulation of abortion to the states. Planned Parenthood had to rethink and regroup to ensure that its facilities continued to be available to pregnant moms. That is, it had to ensure that its annual revenue of $1.6 billion was not sacrificed. It’s OK to sacrifice unborn babies and their vulnerable moms, but this death cult could not risk losing any money at all, just because the Supreme Court interfered with its license to dismember and disembowel preborn babies. Red states are those states (such as Texas and Florida) where Republican state elected officials (including the office of the governor) are in the majority. Blue states (like New York, Illinois, and California) have Democrat-held state elected positions. Breitbart reports that Planned Parenthood, knowing that red states would be hospitable to tighter abortion laws (thus cutting into its revenue), is purchasing “mobile baby-killing machines” to be stationed in blue states on the border with red states. Therefore, women determined to kill their unborn child need only cross the border into a blue state to have the procedure carried out. PP will soon open its first mobile clinic in southern Illinois where abortion remains legal, and will service women in neighbouring red states such as Indiana and Missouri. Red states may develop policies to counter border-crossing abortions but these end-run around abortion regulations – and others, such as delivering the abortion pill by mail – illustrates the necessity of a federal law outlawing abortion.
U.S. military to fund service members’ abortions The Pentagon has announced on Oct. 21, that it will pay for military members to travel for abortions. Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III announced the policy which will use tax dollars to fund out-of-state travel for those seeking to kill their pre-born babies. Many large corporations announced similar measures after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June. There are routine reports of veterans unable to access needed medical care following injuries suffered while serving in the nation’s uniform, but the current administration can find the money to ensure that soldiers and their dependents can kill their preborn children.
Georgetown med school teaching gender re-assignment Georgetown, the first and oldest medical school in the United States, has repeatedly ignored its Catholic ethical heritage, from abortion to euthanasia. Patrick Reilly, president of the Cardinal Newman Society calls Georgetown’s current teaching materials on transgender individuals a “horrific violation of medical ethics” and against “the mission of Catholic education.” Dr. David Reitman introduces first-year medical students to a required course on human sexuality instructing them that patients who suffer gender dysphoria will likely attempt suicide if they are not treated with “puberty blockers, gender-affirming hormone therapy, and surgical sex changes,” and that puberty blockers are “fully” and “completely reversible.” However, a New York Times article reported that “more research is needed to fully understand the impact puberty blockers have on certain patients’ fertility” and there is “little known about the drugs’ lasting effects on brain development and bone mineral density.” Reitman’s “bottom surgery” instruction to reconstruct the genitals of adult patients does indeed suggest informing patients may need to “freeze their eggs or sperm in the event they become infertile or remove reproductive structures necessary to conceive or carry a child.” Reitman’s teaching contains issues that are morally and ethically problematic. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops states that Catholic hospitals must not carry out the procedures nor educate medical students on procedures that violate the Church’s ethical directives. John Brehany, executive vice president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center said: “if you apply traditional moral principles about respect for the human body, both of protecting and taking good care of the body and of not destroying, damaging or sacrificing a part of one’s body except for a very good, well-founded reason, then it
would certainly be (our) position that (Reitman’s teaching) is unethical.” Bishop Michael Burbidge of the Diocese of Arlington, Virginia, says that individuals struggling with gender dysphoria, “should be treated with respect, justice, and charity;” however, “to affirm someone in an identity at odds with biological sex or to affirm a person’s desired ‘transition’ is to mislead that person.” Mary Rice Hasson at the Ethics and Public Policy Center adds: “every person has dignity and deserves to receive medical care and to be treated with kindness and love,” but that only applies to medical treatments that are otherwise “morally sound.”
Love and suffering A recent video on Church Militant showed Joe Gallagher, a CM contributor, witnessing for the life of the unborn. He had attended a Men’s March for Life in Boston, encountered hostility from pro-abortion groups and later met with a proabortion couple and spent the evening discussing the issue with them. He had two important takeaways to share with pro-lifers. First: “We are only pro-life to an extent. When we say we believe something, we only believe it to a point. Most people are only pro-life until it affects them, until their comfort is threatened. So, we are only fully pro-life … if we are willing to embrace that belief to the point of dying … for the sake of goodness, for the sake of Christ and for the sake of others…You don’t back down out of your own fears or when people try to intimidate you in hiding what you stand for.” The second point: “Even when someone literally says they want you dead, you still ought to love them. You love them because our Creator loves them with a love we can never imagine. Therefore, if we love our God, we ought to love those individuals even in persecution. Granted, you might have to defend yourself and others, and that love may include stopping the ‘bad guy.’ Those we confront in love, we cannot hate. We cannot win souls for Christ if proabortion people think we hate them.” Gallagher concluded that he hadn’t converted the couple to the pro-life position, but he had planted a seed in love.
Scotland Bishops condemn transsexual surgery The Bishops’ Conference of Scotland has released a statement condemning transsexual surgery, saying: “The Church does not recognize a legitimate prerogative of the State to redefine in law what is male and female in a way that denies the biological reality of sexual difference. These are part of the natural law which expresses the unchanging principles of the human person in society.” Christians who believe that the Christian churches should “update” their moral teachings to conform to the world are reminded of the words of Scripture: “God created man in His image; in the divine image He created him; male and female He created them.” (Genesis 1:27)
Bubble zones in England The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) in the U.K. has called it “an outrageous assault on civil liberties.” Gavin Ashendon, a former Church of England bishop and convert to Catholicism says: “It is now illegal to cross yourself. Stop for a moment and think about the implications.” What they are referring to is the recent amendment in the British parliament (following a vote of 297 to 110) to impose so-called “buffer zones” in England and Wales to prevent pro-lifers from offering life-affirming options to moms who approach abortion facilities to procure an abortion. The “harassment” that the government says pro-lifers are committing includes pro-lifers wearing pro-life t-shirts, offering pamphlets, referring to the women as “mothers” and offering baby clothes. LifeSiteNews writer Jonathan van Maren points out the prohibition also includes: holding vigils, praying, reciting Scripture, making the sign of the cross, and counselling. He further says: “It is a loss to the pro-life movement, a loss to the women who might finally be
THE INTERIM, NOVEMBER 2022— PAGE 17
granted a real choice, and above all to the babies who have no one to speak for them as they are carried into the ‘clinic’ to be suctioned into bloody slurry or dismembered with metal forceps … These are laws passed by a post-Christian culture to create a silo of silence where babies can be murdered softly, a sacrifice on the altar of the sexual revolution that has so utterly transformed our culture over the past sixty years.” They are called “buffer zones” by advocates because they are predicated on the pretext that they protect women and abortuary staff from harassment and intimidation, if not outright violence; in fact, they are anti-free speech bubble zones that protect the abortion facilities access to patients (and customers), while betraying the pretense that abortion advocates support “choice.”
Buffer zones in Scotland Meanwhile, Scotland is contemplating putting anti-free speech bubble zones around abortion facilities, perhaps using local bylaws. Scottish Members of the British Parliament declined to vote, saying that the Scottish government is going to pass its own bubble-zone legislation. The Scottish government’s chief legal officer, Dorothy Bain, likens peaceful prayer to “violent conduct,” questioning whether there should be any differentiation in law between the two. She suggests that “Silent prayer is far more damaging to the young woman than hurling names and abuse at her.” (It is worth noting that the only violence occurring at the vast majority of abortuaries is the violence taking place inside against the preborn child.) A spokesperson for the Catholic Church in Scotland has called Bain’s comments “absurd” and “alarming.” And lawyer Gerry Moynihan has warned that “using (local) bylaws to target pro-lifers outside abortion ‘clinics’ would be in breech of the law,” protecting free speech.
Patricia Heaton, a pro-life voice Outspoken pro-life activist and three-time Emmy Award winner, Patricia Heaton, has spoken out again to defend unborn babies. You may remember Heaton as the wife of Raymond in Everybody Loves Raymond, and “Frankie” Heck in The Middle. In the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court, abortion protesters took to firebombing and vandalising crisis pregnancy centers, Heaton tweeted “No one has ever died from visiting a pregnancy clinic.” When twitter users demanded that the pregnancy centers offer also promote abortion, Heaton called out their double standard. Planned “provides no pre or post natal care for women—do you demand the same of them? Should they provide free ultrasounds, diapers, medical care for pregnant women who want to keep their babies?” In 2020, she condemned the pro-abortion Democratic Party: “Why would any civilized person want to support a barbaric platform that champions abortion for any reason through all nine months funded by taxpayers?” she tweeted. This was in reply to two contenders for the Democratic Party nomination (Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders) rebuffing pro-life Democrats. Sanders had stated: “I think being pro-choice is an absolutely essential part of being a Democrat.” Heaton replied: “I was raised a Democrat -- protested the Vietnam War, supported migrant workers, etc. However, the minute Democrats targeted the most vulnerable and voiceless among us, I was out.” The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children commends her for having “the courage to stand up against the power of the abortion industry.”
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Mail to: CHP Canada PO Box 4958 Station E, Ottawa ON K1S 5J1
I agree with the following: There is one Creator God—the God of the Bible. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms acknowledges the Supremacy of God and the Rule of Law. All innocent human life must be protected by law from conception until natural death. Marriage is the exclusive union of one man and one woman. Parents are the primary authority for the care and education of their children. Canadian laws must reflect biblical moral standards.
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SAVE THE DATE 05
11
23
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JOIN US ON MAY 11, 2023 FOR THE NATIONAL MARCH FOR LIFE ON PARLIAMENT HILL, OTTAWA! For information on the Candlelight Vigil, Rose Dinner, Youth Conference and other surrounding events, go to marchforlife.ca. Details coming January 2023.